Principles of Peer Leadership
Principles of Peer Leadership was a class focused on applying leadership concepts to those who were leaders among their peers. This was mainly to relate ideas to what residential advisers experience in their jobs, but those of us in the RLC experienced it through the lens of being mentors within the community. We met in recitation classes to discuss the theories and how they related to our concurrent roles, though we were able to share some of our ideas with a larger class group thanks to weekly Canvas discussion boards. I liked this smaller approach, as the recitations allowed everyone the chance to speak their mind, so we could all come to an understanding. When we went online we were able to see more alternative views, which further challenged our ideas but benefited the learning experience as a whole.
Much of the theory we learned was centered around the Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership from Kouzes and Posner’s writing. These five practices were: Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, and Encourage the Heart. Each of them are fairly self-explanatory actions for a leader to do their best for their followers. What we were challenged to do as part of the class was to apply these ideas to our leadership as we worked with the Freshmen in the RLC and report how well our trials had gone with our supervisor.
I did this by assisting both as a mentor within my hall and as a TA in the lecture-styled LDRS 1015 class that was new that semester. In my hall I tried my best to create community events to bring everyone together every so often, though I was unable to find much success with that. Instead, I found more success encouraging and aiding others individually. I would provide guidance to adjusting to life at Tech for the new students, give words of encouragement during stressful times, and listen to and provide solutions to problems others were facing. I found it natural for me to apply the concepts of Model the Way, Enable Others to Act, and Encourage the Heart, though I needed more practice with the other two concepts.
Through those failures I learned valuable lessons. For one, in the particular case of trying to create a community atmosphere, it may be too daunting a task to create large events and expect people to come together over them. Instead, creating smaller events as small tokens for creating a community would be a more reasonable approach. Another issue I had was Challenging the Process, where I would often be a tad embarrassed to suggest a new idea for fear that it would fail. What I had seen through other’s work within this class was how failure provides important learning opportunities. Being afraid to try out a new idea means there is never an opportunity for it to make any change, or set an example for it to be tweaked and tried again. These realizations have stuck with me ever since, with this realization about failure becoming a core belief of mine now. Today, I still play to my strengths of supporting the others around me, but I am much more open to trying new things as a leader and have been more effective in creating communities, allowing me to create more positive environments for the organizations I am a leader in.
Artifacts of this class can be found in the files below:
Joe Downey's Leadership Blog 