It was really nice to have Megan, Brooke and Josh talk about
some of their previous experiences with peer mentoring! This advice should
really help me to be prepared for some of the situations I wouldn’t have
thought about for next semester.
Probably
the most important thing that I learned from this week’s class is that the
planning for the week will take a lot longer than I thought! I thought it would
take at least a half hour but up to two hours, wow! Hopefully with this
knowledge I can make sure to have this time blocked out on Sunday’s of next
fall. Another thing I felt was important relating to making lesson plans was to
start the plan for the week early so that you and your co-mentor have time to
think about different ideas. This will help to reduce the time you have to work
on this stuff especially when you have a busy week coming up! The final major
thing I learned was that there will be some really awkward situations that we
may go through as mentors. Depending on how we handle these situations it can
be easily dealt or not so easy…but just make sure to keep it an enjoyable
experience!
One of the
things that I am really worried about is the situation of having a student that
will not do the blog posts, comments, or come to class. I know that they gave
us an example of this however I didn’t feel like I received a strong answer of
how to deal with this. To me it seemed like they pretty well had the student
just continue to resist and not do the assignments so if anyone has a good idea
of how to deal with this situation please let me know!
Matt, I would agree that one of my biggest worries is dealing with students that have not completed assignments. When I was an honors peer mentor how we dealt with this was to first remind the students a lot about upcoming assignments and to emphasis how important it is to do them especially because it is a pass/fail class. If someone still did not complete the assignment, we would pull them aside after class to talk about it to make sure that they realized that we noticed right away and that it's important that they get it completed right away. After that if they still did not complete it, we would text them and email them until they completed it. If that still didn't work, we would direct the problem to the people above us. In our case, Debra, Allie, and Abby. This method seemed to work pretty well. The only problem I ever had was solved after we met with the student. We made sure to let her know that if she had any questions or needed help at all to contact us. She actually did text me about the assignment and I think that made her more willing to complete the rest of the assignments in the future.
ReplyDeleteMatt,
ReplyDeleteI think your worries on students not completing assignments are completely valid. Personally, I would get annoyed with this issue because I think completing a couple of assignments is a small requirement for a half tuition scholarship. I think that Courtney's idea of constant bombardment of reminders is especially good for freshman as they might not be quite as organized yet. However, Megan seemed to employ this strategy on her one student and it did not work. One idea that I think might work is to try make the assignments fun for them. Let them be creative with their blog and encourage them to incorporate their own opinions into their blog rather than recapping what has been covered in class.
Hope this helps,
Shawn
Matt,
ReplyDeleteI was also surprised on the amount of time out of class that it would take to work on lesson plans and other materials for classes. After talking about it though, I am also glad they gave us ideas on how to track all of the homeworks and also ideas on how to get our lesson plans started. When talking about the situation with the freshmen not doing their blogs and homework I would say that I have to agree with Shawn in the sense that there is only so much we can do and we may have to get the higher ups involved. Plus, if it got to a horrible point maybe we could threaten to take away the scholarship? ;) hahah. jk. but maybe?
Nicole