EDEA 397 Peer Leadership Education & Mentoring

ENGR 250 | EDEA 360 | EDEA 397 | EDEA 460

This course is designed to explore and enhance personal, interpersonal, and organizational skills and understanding required for effective functioning as a student peer leader or mentor for teams, groups, and organizations. The objectives of the course are to guide students to know and understand the self, including the influence of one’s values and other personal, societal, and cultural approaches to personal and interpersonal interactions in groups; acquire and apply leadership skills, including communication, collaboration, consensus decision-making, conflict management, problem-solving, and group management; analyze, reflect upon, and apply leadership theories to issues of team effectiveness, personal development, and group dynamics; plan, execute, and evaluate a campus program or service; apply effective presentational speaking and small group facilitation skills with college peers; know, understand and use appropriate student development theories in building community among a network of students and in discussing issues and challenges that affect student learning, growth, development, and success; successfully communicate, understand, and interact with persons who may hold differing basic assumptions because of various cultural orientations; and identify University resources and services which would be used in addressing student interpersonal needs.

Here are some of the concepts and skills students will explore in this course:

1. Effective Listening
2. Groups & their Dynamics
3. Facilitating Groups
4. Being a Peer Advisor
5. Presentational Skills
6. Common Sense and Other Myths
7. Psychological Types
8. Learning Styles
9. Ways of Thinking
10. Victim or Creator: Taking Action for Success
11. Life's Challenges: What Comes Up for Students & Why?

In addition to the weekly class meetings, students are required to actively participate in a structured supervised practicum offered in conjunction with a number of campus offices. Being an active participant means you will practice, test out, challenge, reflect on, and purposefully observe the key concepts, ideas, theories, and notions covered in class through your practicum experience. The summer section of this course offers one practicum, preparation to be a New Student Orientation leader.