Blim - this is where I was yesterday. I yanked out 157 fabric pin buttons. I love this place, feels like I'm going back to art school. Hey, Blim is moving next year to Main and Columbia.

I am so excited and feel so lucky to have been accepted to the Peer Group Mentoring program run by the Women’s Enterprise Centre. Tonight we meet for the first time. The group mentor is Madeleine Shaw of Lunapads. There will be 6 mentees including myself.

In case you’re wondering if this is for you, I thought I’d share a bit about the process. Tonight we will be introducing ourselves, 15 minutes each, using these focus points emailed to us a week ago:

• when and why you started your business
• the product or service and business model
• a brief history of your journey to date
• how you define success, or what you imagine it looking like (I like this one!)
• personal strengths or experience that you feel others in the group may benefit from
• the three biggest issues or challenges that you are currently facing (this is a good one)
• why you joined the group – what you hope to get out of our time together
• anything else you fell is important for us to know in order to help you

At first I thought, ‘oh my god, what am I going to say’, but this morning I got to work and know that answering these questions in 15 minutes is no problem.

So I’m ready for tonight, and I’m getting ready for Portobello West which is this weekend. I’m now packaging 200 plus buttons. Let me tell you, that’s a lot of work – I’m printing my own cards for now and cutting them, putting the buttons on, and slipping them into cellophane wrappers. Sounds easy right! I’ve got some new buttons and really cute set. Pics coming soon.

In case you missed the big announcement, the Hub Bay Area is partnering with First Light Ventures to offer West Cost Village Capital (WCVC)- a new model of investing in social enterprises using peer groups of entrepreneurs.

We’re pretty excited about the opportunity this offers our members to scale-up their social ventures, and it seems we’re not the only ones. In just the few short days since the announcement, the blogosphere is already buzzing.

If you’d like to find out what all the excitement is about, or simply share in our joy, please swing by the Hub Monday night for the info session. This is the best place to have your questions answered about how village capital will work, how to be involved, and what this means for the Hub community.

You’ll find all the details of the event here, and please do RSVP if you can. It helps us look our best for your arrival.

Theme: Get involved. Peer mentor training tonight.

Fun Factor: Average. Got some wii mario kart action

Attedance: Average. Its now our average group, about 50% growth from this time last year.

Favourite Moment: Doing the peer mentor training. Hearing how excited they all and the quality of the people doing the training.

Coaching and peer mentoring is a very involved yet beneficial process amongst any school staff. Coaching takes into account the needs of the school organization, as well as the experience, maturity, knowledge, and career path of the individual (Zepeda, 164). Currently in our profession, teachers are held a lot more accountable for student learning than in previous years. Therefore we must implement new techniques to collaborate and work together to ensure that that student learning does happen. Teachers must learn from each other and improve as well. Coaching can be beneficial by providing support and feedback to teachers. In our discussion this week, it seems as though we have all had various experiences and levels of experience with peer coaching. My experience with peer coaching also followed the steps as stated by Zepeda, which include a pre-observation where key topics of concern are identified, an observation of a lesson (or lessons) being taught, a post-observation conference to reflect and discuss elements of the lesson, and a follow-up or steps to take for future lessons (186). In my own experience, it was interesting to see how the coach is often able to clearly identify elements in your teaching style that you may overlook yourself when you are in the spotlight. Coaching is helpful in providing you feedback as well as enabling you to reflect on your own teaching. Teachers play the role of learners in the coaching experience.

Theme: Get Involved. We offered some “peer mentor” roles in preperation for the next group of young people coming into the program.

Fun Factor: Averag. Kept it up on stage for pretty much the whole structured program which was great. Next week we got new special surprises.

Attendace: Average. A great core group.

Favourite Moment: After talking about leadership roles and mentoring its been exciting as some key young people have really grasped onto it, encouraging me to speak with their parents about what its about. Its really exciting!!

Welcome to the Leadership Lessons blog, straight from Master Certified coach Sherryl Christie-Bierschenk.

Please check back often as we get rolling.

We’ve decided to let you into our batcave (LB 620-2). Our office hours are now posted on the website and the office has been cleaned-ish (after all, we are students).

Mondays: 10-11h30am with Katrina ($$$$!)
Tuesdays: 4-6pm with Emily da President
Wednesdays: 2:30-4pm with Elliot our politician (aka Internal)
Thursdays: 1-2:30pm with Mr. VP Social Marc-Antoni

Soon, you’ll see us in your classrooms talking about SHAC and our identities will be revealed. Dun-nun-naaah! But its a good thing ’cause then you know who to bother for peer mentoring, free coffee, and more (check out services).

*minutes from office meetings are now available at documents.
*our calendar is now available

AmbITion is a programme for the arts and cultural sector – helping organisations achieve their 21st century sustainability ambitions by implementing integrated IT and digital developments. This resource includes practical case studies sharing learning from projects across the country, policy developments, funding opportunities, signposting and  a breakdown of the range of programmes and opportunities available including; ‘Accreditation’, ‘Volunteering’, ‘Work-related Learning’, ‘Innovation & Entrepreneurship’, ‘Peer-Mentoring’, ‘Youth Voice & Influence’ and much more. …

 The website has loads of useful info and resources: http://www.getambition.com

Just a little bit of background, before I get into this post. I’m currently taking a peer mentoring class at the university; the premise of the class is as follows. The program director selects upper level undergraduates to help fellow students (usually first and second years) develop skills in active learning, critical thinking and effective writing. We’re not supposed to be “junior TA’s” since we’re not supposed to be teaching specific course material. Rather, we try to engage students in several “axillary tasks” essential to active learning: we help students learn how to ask good questions, we provide advice on study skills, we review drafts of assignments to ensure clarity, we help students verbally process material. Sometimes we give presentations or try to illustrate concepts in the material by using films, developing class activities and worksheets, organizing study sessions, and so on. We also try to support students and help them develop confidence in thier abilities as meaning makers. Additionally, we have considerable freedom to develop our own role; each peer mentors’ “Mentoring Identity” is contingent on their student experience-it’s informed by how they have negotiated university territory themselves.

Often the distinction between “content provider” and “student supporter” can be pretty vague-and I will admit, that in the messy field of student-mentor interaction, I don’t think the boundary between the roles is necessarily easy to maintain.  Often students want us to provide them with straightforward answers to complex issues-and these may be impossible to provide given our own limited knowledge (as fellow undergraduates, likely only seeing our mentoring course material for the second time) and the complexity of the issues themselves. Often we trip ourselves up by thinking a good mentor is someone who gives the student what they want-the straightforward solution, the tightly articulated lecture. Students can be grumpy with mentors who seemingly elude the question itself- we try to note its ambiguity and turn it back on the student instead. Students who are pressed for time are rightfully frustrated by this and question our usefulness. Moreover, I’ve found “turning the question back on the student” is itself a skill; since it is difficult to encourage critical thinking in a well articulated manner. I can often confuse students instead of engaging them, since communicating as an authority is still a working skill for me.

However, all of these issues have made me think of the complexities of teaching and learning; and what it means to “educate” a student. I consider how the institutional context, the demands of ordinary life, and the identities and life experiences of both students and teachers inform this thing called “education.” An illustration might be the simplest way of elaborating on this connection between institutions and life in education: everyone remembers those standardized tests everyone takes throughout the K-12 years. However, If the wide degree of answers on any standardized test can tell us, its not that some people are necessarily better at squiring knowledge than others, but that we all bring different life experiences, learning styles, priorities, and previous education to each new concept we learn. So it’s no wonder a student performs on these tests differently depending on the subject, and often depending on how it was taught. However, we try to sum up student’s relative intelligence-and we reward or punish students in our school (and by extension) social systems accordingly.

Back then, our education was almost entirely geared towards “maximizing performance” on standardized tests for the sake of increasing our particular school’s credibility  within the wider regional school system. And I’m not about to argue against these tests in and of themselves; there must be an instrument for that determines how much students are learning in their classes, in order to make schools accountable for their teaching strategies. However, all of academic life is centered on how to answer multiple choice tests, since these are the easiest to mark and administer given the large number of students being tested. Critical thinking gets a back burner. I specifically remember my teachers avoiding most activities with titles such as “critical thinking exercise” in addition to most of the questions appended to the ends of textbook chapters, not because they wanted to but because we “didn’t have time.” No wonder we grow up to be university students deeply challenged and troubled by what our teachers expect of us.

In other words, I’m not sure that anything is really learned in this environment where everyone must compete and perform, lest they end up rebuked by the system as “underachievers.” I think most kids, especially when they’re young, probably want to learn but something in their outside lives tells them that knowledge won’t get them anywhere, or they don’t “learn properly,” and I don’t think the school system does much to discourage this kind of thinking. Unfortunately, I don’t think the logic of “education” changes much in university, which is why I’ve used this example. The university does, on some level, try to correct for this (and must succeed on some level, if we are being challenged to rethink the academic passivity we learned in high school). However, the larger patterns of education remain fundamentally unchanged; if all that really matters is “looking good on paper,” the process of learning is largely ignored or rationalized (shortened in a way that can also provide maximum “learning outcomes”), those who fail at ameliorating themselves to it end up dropping out, and those who know how to play into their teachers preferences (often with minimum effort) succeed. Risk and ambition are usually stifled (since there’s a greater potential for failure, and failure will eventually diminish further opportunities to advance your education/start a meaningful career)-which is why students try so hard to please their professor in the first place.

But I can’t help but wonder what would happen if there wasn’t so much fear and insecurity around failure; if we weren’t taught that “screwing up” in a limited way didn’t mean we were somehow less valuable as people and learners (“value” being denoted by what you gain materially if you succeed and lose when you “fail”), which is ultimately what most people learn through their education. If we lived in a world where it was easier to feel an inherent sense of self worth, we’d likely take more thoughtful risks, and these would potentially stand a greater chance of succeeding. If failure, at any rate, weren’t an academic death sentence, then maybe fewer people would be less inclined to give up before they’re out of the starting gate. We could, after all, just try again. (Which isn’t necessarily the same thing as arguing for unlimited chances for undeserving students, but opening up a space for people to regain a sense of purpose if they don’t succeed the first time they try something).

Now this all sounds slightly polemical, I suppose, and possibly more Utopian than I intended. Some people fail because they’re lazy, don’t do work, and that should be punished in some way, shouldn’t it, if students are to become truly accountable?But I can’t help but feel, and this is potentially an over generalization from my own experience, there’s often more behind apathy than laziness. There’s usually fear at work on some level, a fear that effort won’t produce a desirable outcome. Studies on perfectionism back this up.  In my own student situation this has often stemmed from my own devaluation of the worth of my effort, and a hideously unrealistic expectation about what the outcome is supposed to achieve.This manifests itself as fear, resistance, being overwhelmed, etc. And even the most successful students experience fear around that anticipated moment, somewhere in the future, when they don’t get the grade they feel they deserve. (And this often manifests as resentment towards professors-not that I’m saying professors evaluate perfectly, or give perfect assignments). And as people who care about education, if this fear exists, and it’s holding students back, what do we do about it?

In peer mentoring these kinds of questions underlie our common anxieties and confusion about what our tasks should be. Do we give students straightforward answers, do we encourage the recitation of factual information, or do we encourage students to “move beyond the material” and “do something with it”-ie. think critically? But there’s more than that.  Considering this pressure (that we really can’t escape) to make education expedient, there usually isn’t much time in one class, to learn both the background information and how to work creatively with it. I think learning is a combination of the two and it seems every class emphasizes one at the other’s expense, since classes are so short and instructors are required to cover so much material in less than four months. Both the instructors of “lecture based” and “inquiry based” courses think they’re doing students a favor. Lecture based profs do students a favor by giving clearly communicated background info on a topic as well as an understanding of what bits of information are necessary to have a “necessary background” in a topic. Inquiry based courses do students a favor since they challenge students to make the material relevant to thier lives or an actual research or CSL situation; they also encourage students to be independent, and we all need to know how we’re going to operate when there’s no professor to guide us. As teachers, everyone faces constraints and I think most teachers believe their doing the best they can.

What this insider understanding has given me is a clearer picture of the complexities of “education”-I’ve gotten to see first hand how it is a loaded term, and how much teachers struggle with whether or not they are helping students gain a “meaningful education.” The issue of fear is something that fascinates me; Louis Schmier, a university professor, engages with this issue in his blog. He essentially argues, that in order to challenge the fear we all experience as we try to become educated, educators must do thier part to create a classroom that is nurturing and supportive.  This is the only way that we can A. encourage more students to reach their potential (and therefore operate more successfully in this system where high grades=life success), and B. Cultivate a kind of educational value structure where students learn that part of being successful lies in how a student chooses to engage with the world. Students, for Shmier, grow to be leaders who are invariably responsible to others for thier decisions, whether they choose to admit it to themselves or not.

I’m bringing Shmier’s blog into this because my Peer Mentoring instructor has asked another student and I to give a presentation on his ideas. I’ve added a link to a post I might use in my presentation; his writing is so cogent I had to let him speak for himself. I’ve added a few quotes here; I might refer to them in a later post. I want to use my next post as a sounding board for my presentation ideas; I want to think through this link between education and fear a little more. What I might conclude with is this: my experience and reading in my course so far have both given me a better sense of the difficulties of teaching. However, the more I experience the real thing, the more it seems like this might actually be for me.

http://therandomthoughts.edublogs.org/2008/11/03/my-teaching-methods/.  it but

First, and foremost, for me the classroom is like my garden. There is nothing that is ever ugly in it. If it is capable of blooming, it stays. Likewise, I believe that, without exception, there is good, ability, and potential in every student. And, that is worth believing.(….)In the extraordinary, often besieged, more often confused, still more often overwhelmed, very real, complicated human parade that walks the halls and marches into the classroom, playing and working, sociable and solitary, trusting and suspicious, loyal and betrayed, outgoing and shy, laughing and raging, focused and distracted, disciplined and happy-go-lucky, joyous and sad, giggling and gasping, charming and maddening, smiling and frowning, healthy and sickly, yearning for love, and asking for nurturing, thrown about by the ebb and flow, the swells and eddies and logjams of the many currents of life, I’ve never known a student who wasn’t worth the trouble and effort required to make her or his life whatever it could possibly be.

(…)Second, I know I must know and believe that I have the therapeutic power to be that inspiring or charismatic or nurturing person in a student’s life. Third, I know that a student’s sense of belonging, security, and self-confidence in a classroom provides the scaffolding for deep learning beyond grade getting. Fourth, I believe every student comes on campus with a desire to learn though she or he may not know all there is to know about how to do it. Fifth, I believe that students will be more responsive and motivated to learn when I first create a safe, trusting, and secure environment in which all students feel comfortable, valued, and noticed. Sixth, the classroom is a shop of “serious novelties” and adventurous “let’s see what happens” experiments that tap into students’ unused strengths.

-An excerpt from “Random Thoughts”-the italicized writing is not mine! However, I can’t help but read this and think, “who wouldn’t want to have more teachers who thought this way?”

This is a great opportunity to meet other women wanting to return to work after a career break. A place to discuss your goals and any issues you have about getting back to work, exchange ideas, give each other support and make new contacts. If you are already in work and looking for a change, you are very welcome to come along.

This workshop is for you if you:
Are a woman qualified to degree level in a Science, Engineering, Technology or a Built Environment subject (SET) and:
Want to return to work after a career break
Are unable to find a suitable SET opportunity
Are working in an unsuitable SET or non-SET job
Are eligible to work in the UK
Type of event: Networking

Organiser: UKRC
Venue: The Y
7 East Street
Leicester
LE1 6EY
Contact: info@ukrc4setwomen.org
Cost: FREE
Date: 1 Oct 2008
Time: 10.30am – 1.00pm

One thing I have come to realize in the past few weeks is if I need someone to help me keep me on my toes, than I need to ask a close peer. A peer that is at the same level as me professionally and I am truly comfortable being honest with. There are many emerging leaders that have focused on gaining strong, older, more experienced mentors, but there is always a time when you need one of your peers to call you out, because they may be able to understand your problem more directly.

You see, everyone who is close to me knows I am terrified of public speaking. Well, who isn’t, right? (If you aren’t let me know I want to know your tricks!) Just recently, I had to speak at the launching of the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network here in Grand Rapids. I was feeling pretty good about it in the weeks prior to the event, but on the day of the event became more and more nervous. I tried some new tricks, asking everyone I saw what they would do, and still to no avail, I was terrified when I got up there in front of everyone. I wanted to talk about so much more during my time on the platform, but do to my shakes I had to make it quick.

I learned more than a few things from the experience, all through talking to my peers afterwards:

First – I don’t sound or look as scared as I thought. To hear this was comforting, but I’m still nervous.

Second – It is alright if during my speech/talk I take a second to say, “ohh let’s see what else I have to say”. One of my peers said, “It makes you seem real.” So, what I thought was an error in my speech was really a moment for me to connect more with the audience.

And Third – It is alright to ask for help. Prior to the event, no one had suggested they could speak, so I kind of got stuck with it, and I took it on willingly hoping to use it as a learning experience. During the debrief time yesterday, someone said, I wish we were able to tell them more during the presentation. I thought “Ohh really, me too!”, but refrained from blurting it out. After all that nervousness I could have called my board up one-by-one to talk about their objectives, all I needed to do was ask. “Just ask”, what a crazy concept! I feel like I hear the phrase a lot but for some reason it just never clicked until now.

So, the moral of the story is…ask your peers for help. Your peers won’t let you down when it comes to giving constructive feedback and most of the time they may be having the same feelings you are.

Do you have a story to share about how a peer kept you inline?

-Tera Wozniak – Millennial