Mentoring 101

I have decided to read “Mentoring 101: What every leader needs to know” on a recommendation from a friend and former peer mentor of mine. They read multiple John Maxwell books about mentoring and being a leader and they really liked this particular author for mentoring aid. This book covers the essential need to know of mentoring students and what kind of a person it takes to be an effective mentor. Maxwell writes about three concepts to becoming a great peer mentor and they are:
1. Make people development your top priority
2. Limit who you take along
3. Develop relationships before starting out
Focusing on student development is ideal if you want to make a difference in your student’s lives, Maxwell gives an example of him turning a church of 3 people into 250 by focusing on their development and creating leaders to build up the church. Limiting who you take with you is probably a main reason we have recitation. It is more beneficial to develop students in smaller groups and easier to focus on each students development. Finally, the importances of building relationship with our students are the same as we talked about last year. If our students feel more comfortable with their mentors on a friend level, they are more likely to succeed and let their mentors help them develop. Maxwell continues with tons of great tips for mentoring but I will let you all check them out yourself.

MBTI and ME

As the semester moves on, the busier that all the peer mentors and I seem to get. Although we are getting busier we need to really maintain focus on our students and MBTI I believe was a good break and focus for me. It was nice not have to worry too much about get a lesson plan together for MBTI (Thanks Debra) and it was also really cool to be able and sit back and see how all my students react to the MBTI activities. It is good to know about how students in a class act to different activities, so Zach and I know how to make lesson plans around most types of MBTI.

I am a ESTJ, one thing I think is interesting is in our reports with the facet preferences the separating of each letter into five sub categories. For example, I am an “E” but at times I sit back and listen like an “I” and looking at my facet results I am midzone “I” for receiving and contained. Receiving says I am willing to introduce people that have not been introduce and I know that I introduce people all the time because I feel weird when I don’t get introduced but yet I am willing to initiate conversation in social situation with people I already know. Which I find to be very true because if I don’t know a whole bunch of people around me I am quieter than I would be around a bunch of my friends. I could go on and on about the interesting differences I found in my facet preferences but I don’t want to bore you. Lets just say I really enjoy reading our reports with facet results included.

Hunting down campus resources!

Hello again everyone, I hope you all had as much fun during Veishea and the Hixson Retreat. I know I feel a lot closer to many of you after the activities we had at the retreat. I especially feel closer to Kelly after our romantic campanile scene tonight, we had such a good fake kiss that Karen even thought we kissed and she was standing right there. After the retreat, video shooting, and scavenger hunt my excitement for next year grows. I think we have a good group of peer mentors and we will have a lot of fun with our freshmen.
The scavenger hunt was really fun and we learned where a lot of the campus resources are located. For instance, I didn’t know where the study abroad office was located nor would I have been able to find where it was located. It was like fallowing a maze to get there, but know how to get there. I am going to keep in mind this for my next year’s campus resources lesson plan. I will probably take my students up there to show them where it is if they want information on studying aboard. I also was unaware that the lake and swans were a gift from one of the Iowa State graduating classes. This way of doing a lesson on campus resources is way better than just teaching in front of the class and telling them about it. Well that’s all for now, I’ll see everyone in class Tuesday.

GOOOOAAAAAALLLL!!!!

Hey everyone, I am sure as many of you are, I am very excited to start filming for the digital story telling project. It should be a really fun video! That being said, Zach thanks for all the prep work you have down with the script and songs. Also Zach and Karan had a good lesson on Tuesday over setting goals with SMART and the M’s. I like SMART because it helps set your goals and I like M’s because it helps you figure out how to accomplish the goal.

My goal for next year as a peer mentor is to learn my students’ names within the first three weeks and make a connection with each one of them. This goal is Specific because I want to know names and connect not just I want to get to know my students. It is also Measureable because I put a time limit on it and I ether know their names or not but connection is a little harder to measure. One way I can maybe measure my connections could be, knowing personal facts about my students, something they like or where they are from. Achievable is the next one and my goal is reasonably achievable, with the retreat and a couple classes I think I can get their names down in three weeks. My goal is Relevant because if I show the initiative to learn their names, my students will be more will to approach me with any issue that may arise. As I already said my goal is Time-limited which I set to three weeks for learning names. As for the M’s – Motivation, Make comments, Modify environment, and Monitor actions. My goals have motivation to learn my students’ name because I don’t like it when people forget my name so I should at least learn their names. I also am terrible with names, sometimes someone will tell me their name and 5 seconds later I have already forgot so this will be good practice. I can make comments if I can remember someone name and then modify environment to aid in remember a name. I can monitor my process by attempting reciting my students’ name in classes.

Diversity Event/ Digital Story Telling Project

I went to “Politics, Policy and the Reality of Leadership” with Gwen Ifill on Wednesday night last week. Gwen Ifill is moderator and managing editor of Washington Week and senior correspondent for The PBS Newshour. She is also the author of The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama. Gwen talked about some issues of being a black women and struggling to succeed. In order for women to succeed, they have to break through some glass ceilings. When they do break through the glass ceilings, women should bring their youth with them even though they might not want to fallow.

I learned a few things about what black women go through working to succeed in the work force of a leadership role. The bar is set really low for women leaders so when they run for or are in a leader position everybody makes a big deal out of it (i.e. Hilary Clinton for President). While yes it is great having females in leadership position but it is hard for women since the bar is so low because no one thinks they will make it. Then some people think that women should be leaders and especially black women. Gwen talked about an experience she had with an individual in her office when she work at a newspaper. Someone left a disturbing, racist note on her desk, I’ll leave out the details of the note but in a nut shell it said she didn’t belong there and needed to get out. Gwen said that the when she saw the note her first thought was who is this note for. Then when she took the note to her boss and the person responsibly was not disciplined. Gwen was offered another job. I enjoyed this story because of how Gwen acted in the situation. She did not get angry publicly. She just shrugged it off and continued with her career. After Gwen’s lecture I am going to give women of leadership roles more respect and treat them as a human not just as the sex, race, and etc.

In class on Tuesday we had a work day for our digital story telling project. We had some great ideas thrown around and I am excited to get filming. I am glad the video I found was useful to our project. Although massively inappropriate for our class and the video we want to make. This idea seemed too good to pass up, so I apologize if anyone was offended by this video. I also like the GTL idea with Cy so kudos to whoever thought of that. One other thing, that I don’t think got overlook was something Beth had brought up having the freshmen be able to choose three different genres to work with. I personally think that it is a good idea because finding song from one genre and one genre alone will be extremely difficult.

Spring Fever?

This week has been a long week, I had to remember back to class what we even talked about. I first thought it was the twitter class with Brandon and Chelsee, I guess you could call it spring fever or something like that. The facilitation class Silas and Allison did was really interesting because I saw some of the things that help me learn in class or studying. I also realized the importance of different teaching styles, just because we learn one way doesn’t mean we all learn that way. While looking through intelligences, I can see parts of most of them that I relate to. Some of my major ones would be Bodily/Kinesthetic or Logical/Mathematical because I learn best while working with my hands and converting what I am learning into tables, charts, etc. Not everyone learns best these ways, so next year when planning my lesson plans I need to learn incorporate different learning styles. As the semester goes on and I get to know my mentees I can incorporate the main learning styles that my mentees will best learn from.

In class we did an activity where we named off a bunch of problems freshmen might come across. Then we picked out our top learning styles and talked with others with like learning styles in how know what our learning style is like can help solve some of their problems. For example, Logical/Mathematical people like perform calculations and recognize abstract patterns. Using this we can find a way to relate things to our real life to study or fix any other problems. The Logical/Mathematical people like tables, charts, graphs, and working in groups, knowing this we can make tables, charts, or graphs to help us study the material. We can also get a study group together with others of the same learning style. Knowing these things I can farther expand my knowledge and help me study more. Then next year I can pass of these qualities so the incoming freshmen can get a start of on the right foot.

SPRING BREAK!!!!!

I hope all you guys and gals are having a good break so far, I know I am! There is nothing like waking up at 6 in the morning to stand out in 20 degree weather to build a house. If I would have been thinking, I would have wrote this earlier this week so I wouldn’t have to do it on my spring break trip in good old Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I will apologize for the shortness of this blog but we are heading out to eat soon then playing some games with my fellow ConE’s. See you all in Tuesday after spring break!

• What is your favorite way to communicate? What is a common communication tool that you don't like to use?
  I personally enjoy Skype as a communication tool because with the video chats, you can use sarcastic or tone of voice instead of a text or IM. If you don't want to see someone Skype allows to IM or just voice chat. One communication tool I despise is Web-CT
  "email" probably because I never check it.
• How has your communication style or mediums in which you communicate changed since coming to college?

Something I never would catch on is Twitter! I am not sure why I thought that but Twitter is becoming more popular. One that is very useful in professional world is Linked In, for those of you that don’t know that this is. It is a facebook site for businesses, you can find jobs, interviews, employers, or other colleagues

• How did you honestly feel about the Twitter activity or just Twitter in general?

I thought the Twitter activity was good, although the thought of sitting in class “Twittering” sounds a bit ridiculous. I was actually fun just tweeting back in forth about random stuff and then answering questions although it is hard to type on my phone as fast as people could on the computers.