LPS's and The Retreat

Last week's class was spent talking about lesson planning structures. I think this topic needed to be touched on. I knew a little about what we were trying to accomplish with the lesson planning structures, but found myself a little lost once I started making my own. After a while I started to get the hang of it, but it's nice to have some set guidelines to help get the job done.

Yesterday was our big retreat. We started out with a pretty fun little scavenger hunt around Ames. I've never heard of anyone doing a scavenger hunt by getting hints via text message. I felt like I was on a game show challenge. After that we went to Perfect Games for even more fun. We bowled and played some arcade games, but I must say the highlight was laser tag. It was great just hanging out and getting to know the other peer mentors a little better! Heath and Allie said the point of the retreat was just having fun with each other, and I think that was accomplished.

Professionalism

The big discussion this week was about keeping a professional relationship with our students. We spoke about some situations that we could find ourselves in, and discussed appropriate ways to react to these situations. I think this discussion needed to happen sometime before we start interacting with our students. I can see every one of the situations we talked about happening sometime during next semester, and we should have some set appropriate ways to handle ourselves in order to keep our professional reputation intact. The class seemed to already have a pretty good idea of the way they should handle these situations, but it was still good to get it on the table and out in the open.

MetaWhat?

First off I want to say Anthony and Kelly did a great job with the discussion starter. The class really started feeding off each other during the talk about being a good facilitator.

This week we talked about developing metacognition. I was one who had never really heard of the term, or just don't remember if I did. From the short discussion we had about it and the hand out we completed in class, it seems like a useful tool to develop. Thinking about your thinking. It sounds pretty vague at first. But if you really get to understand how you think about and react to certain situations, you could be in complete control of yourself at all times. Fully developing good metacognition skills could result in a more organized, rational, and controlled self. These all seem like good things to me.