Leading Groups and Problem Solving!

            I hope everyone enjoyed the intense and close basketball game on Saturday! As you all know Nikki and I presented during our class on Thursday. I thought overall for this being our first time leading a class we did pretty well. I know that I have some things that I personally need to work on and continue to strive to get better at such as speaking louder and more clearly as well as not just going off of the outline for our presentation. Besides those personal things, our topic was about the various aspects of how to lead groups effectively. We started off by going over our introduction followed by the discussion and situational strips we provided. I think our situational strips really helped our fellow peer mentors by providing real situations that we, as peer mentors, may run into throughout our experience as a peer mentor.

            At the retreat Sunday Brooke and Sam presented their presentation about chapter 5 Problem Solving with Individuals from the week we missed class due to the snowy weather. They both had to remind most of us about the different things we read in the chapter because it was such a little while ago! During their discussion they explained the ways to formulate a diagnosis about a problem and the three sources of a problem. These three sources are the gap, the hole, and the obstacle which they explained to us and gave greater insight about. We talked about the different sources and explained how to deal with these different situations. We also talked about ways to problem solve by thinking outside of the box. Some of the really great ideas we came up with to think outside of the box were to think while in the shower and brainstorm together.

            During the retreat we had several ice breaker activities that were all great ideas to use for our own mentoring groups. Although some of the activities, such as Kayla’s, I feel would be better to use that later in your semester with your students to get to know the stuff about them that they may be scared to write down or say out loud. Otherwise I felt like the retreat went great!