Spring 2022

Over the past two years, I have learned many things about myself. One of which is that I love teaching. Whether it be giving a presentation on global health, teaching neuroscience to high schoolers, or leading H100 for the incoming freshman students, leadership in education is something that truly excites me. Although H397 is primarily aimed towards preparing me for teaching the introductory honors class next fall just as I did last fall, I've still learned tons of broadly applicable skills with a unique perspective of having taught this class before with my own lesson plans.

The first of which would be how to deal with harsh situations as a leader. Last quarter I had many particular situations that I hadn’t expected, such as tailoring my class to still be relevant to a student planning on dropping out of the honors program or students expressing symptoms of anxiety after the four year plan assignment. When I had done this assignment, I found it extremely useful and actually enjoyed doing it, so to hear this from many of my students was surprising as much as it was a wake up call to consider things not just from my own perspective, but also the perspective of the rest of the class. Throughout H397, I’ve had many opportunities to apply this thought to various scenarios, such as preparing myself to deal with a student saying a particularly harmful comment that requires me to ask them to leave the room. I’ve spent much of this quarter considering how this would negatively impact the atmosphere of the classroom as well as how to minimize it. But the worse scenario would be to put myself in a student’s shoes and imagine how they would feel if something hurtful was said and nothing was done to address it. As a leader, I believe that utilizing this applied perspective of putting my students’ views in line with my inherently biased views as an educator (and relatively new student of the honors program) is critical for my growth as a conscientious leader.

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Furthermore, I have had the opportunity to develop much of my community teaching skills throughout the course by observing the methods of other fellow peer educators. Keeping in line of the theme of putting myself in others’ shoes, being able to see their fresh perspectives on something as simple as how they format their presentation slides to something as complex as navigating issues in student identity in the classroom as been incredibly useful to improving my own lesson plans. One particular instance that comes to mind was an activity we did during the in person retreat (which we were unable to have my first year as a peer educator due to COVID) where we took scenarios and labeled them as either “institutionally-oriented/student-oriented” and “race-conscious/race-blind” on a graph. We proceeded to have discussion on where we would put each situation on the graph, which led to a lot of insight in how differently I might perceive handling race-related issues compared to other peer educators. But the thing that stuck out most to me was the fact that the conversation extended beyond the original lesson plan and also into redefining the categories, switching “race-conscious” to “race-aware” because of how it revealed our own personal confusion in understanding such a difficult topic. Doing this activity, among many others throughout the quarter, showed me that equitable teaching is not just saying that racism is bad and avoid it, but that there are grey areas that require more nuanced thinking than this to ensure we avoid the most harm and provide the most welcoming environment.

These are just a few snapshots of some of the most impactful moments of what I experienced this quarter that added onto what I learned last year, but there were lots of other experiences such as observing differences in lesson plan structure and understanding why the advisors made said changes (i.e. eliminating end of quarter presentations), seeing the environment that the other peer educators make for their icebreakers, or reflecting on making new lesson plans after remembering things I had to change in the moment last year or that didn’t work out properly. Overall, my general takeaway is that teaching can always be improved and some of the greatest improvements (at least for me) have been applying my own experiences and anticipations to inform the changes that I make for my next class.