Conferring at Conferences

This week, I went to the learning community institute and the Iowa State Leadership Experience conferences. They both provided me with a great deal of information that I can use in my social life, in academia, and next fall in my recitation section. At the learning community institute, one of the events I went to was about time management and study groups and taught by Carrielle Cofax. I learned some pretty important ideas about studying at this event. I learned that when you study, you should take a break every 20 minutes in order to stay focused. This seems counterintuitive because you would lose important ideas while writing a paper or you would never get important projects done. However, I have realized that I tend to study and do work for hours on end which may inhibit my ability to retain information. Perhaps taking a break would allow me to improve my studying. This information will be very helpful for my recitation next fall because I can help students identify what kind of studying works best for them. Another event I attended at LCI was the Nature of Science in an English Learning Community which was taught by Jenny Aune. I found this session to be very informative. Jenny presented information regarding her research which was about how she incorporated the nature of science and misconceptions about science into an English 250 class. Most of the information presented was about how science could be biased, and that it was not perfect. In most of my classes this semester and last semester, we are just beginning to discuss these ideas. I feel that if I had learned this freshman year, I could have brought a whole different perspective to each of my classes. While I don’t see us peer mentors being able to apply these ideas to our recitations next fall, I do believe that freshman could learn a whole lot more by having a specific class devoted to this idea. Perhaps the university could create a class for this purpose.

At ISLE (pronounced Izzle), I found the keynote speaker to be very interesting. During his speech, he had us form to circles and talk with various people about important events in our life and ask questions about those events. I feel this is important because it is one thing to be proud about an accomplishment, but it is another to ask why you feel proud and build on that. Another event I attended was Positive Conflict which was taught by Michelle Boettcher and Brad Freihoeffer. This was interesting because it brought up different conflict management styles. I found that I have a competing conflict management style which means that I see conflict as a win-lose situation. This is important to know because it will influence how I handle my interactions with other peer mentors and with my students next fall. I will have to keep myself in check to insure that I pay attention to the styles of everyone else to avoid aggravating the conflict. As the instructors said, conflict is going to happen, but combat is optional. Finally, the other event I attended was the Johari Window which was taught by Carolyn Duven. The lesson from this was that a group dynamic is influenced by what is known by yourself and what is known by others. We want to increase what is known by everyone while decreasing the unknown areas. This means that it is important to ask questions otherwise groups will never be fully cohesive.

I’m sorry for the essay of a blog post. I learned a lot from these conferences. I hope that I can successfully apply the knowledge I have gained to every aspect of my life.