Honors 397: Spring reflection
June 2018
This quarter, I was in the seminar Honors 397 to prepare for becoming an Honors Peer Educator (PE) in the fall. PEs lead incoming students through Honors 100, which introduces them to the Honors curriculum and requirements, familiarizes them with UW as a whole and the community resources we have available, and gives them the tools they need for their first year in the UW and the interdisciplinary Honors program. I was really excited for this opportunity because I love to teach—in high school, I was a peer sexual health educator with Planned Parenthood as well as a math and homework-help tutor, and these experiences inspired me to pursue my teaching certificate as an undergraduate and potentially later get a Master’s in teaching secondary education. When I went through Honors 100 myself, fall quarter of this year, my PE was super down-to-earth and friendly. She made the role seem really valuable and rewarding, and I knew I wanted to do it the next year.
In Honors 397, I learned more about the process of teaching than I ever have before. When I designed my lesson plans, I had to reflect on past teaching experiences—both formal, as mentioned above, and informal, like being a role model for my little sister and giving presentations in class—and how being a PE was going to be similar to or different from these. Initially, I had a tendency to make my lesson plans very slideshow- and lecture-heavy, mirroring the format of giving a very extended class presentation, mainly because I wasn’t sure how to incorporate the necessary information into any other format. With feedback from my Honors advisers, I learned to structure lessons to be more interactive. I also got more confident in my ability to come up with creative energizers/activities, so that when it came time for our Individual Teach at the end of this quarter, I made up my own interactive activity for my fellow students to participate in as I taught about health and wellness.
Overall, I have a much deeper appreciation for the process of teaching and lesson planning now. When I was in Planned Parenthood’s Teen Council, we used already-scripted lesson plans: each component was already broken down for us, complete with an estimate of how much time it would take and potential backup options if the class wasn’t responsive, and the interactive activities were pre-planned, so that we just had to facilitate them. I didn’t think about how much work goes into painstakingly creating these lesson plans, especially coming up with activities that both are fun and energizing AND further the goals of the lesson. When I started lesson planning on my own, I realized what a poor concept I had of budgeting time and estimating how much time each component would take (again, something to be gently corrected by the Honors advisers), and I struggled to come up with innovative ways to make the lessons unique. But through our course readings this quarter, which focused on teaching strategies for adult learners, I gained more inspiration for lesson planning—my goal as an educator, and all the things I could do to achieve that goal, became clearer.
Something that I have been thinking about a lot this quarter is the idea of leadership. It’s honestly been kind of startling to realize that I’m going to be in a leadership role. In high school, I wrote off “leadership” as being the domain of flashy blonde student government kids—not something I was interested in, and not something I felt compelled to take on. Even throughout my life and teaching experiences, I’ve never really identified as a leader. But at our Honors 397 retreat, where we all categorized our leadership styles and identified our respective strengths and weaknesses, I realized for the first time that that was what I would be doing. It’s been very powerful to realize that someone like me (who doesn’t consider themselves a natural leader) can nonetheless take on the role to create positive change in other students’ lives.
Attached is a document that shows my lesson plans as they look now, at the end of spring quarter. I definitely anticipate having to change things up a bit in the fall based on what my group of Honors 100 students is like, so stay tuned!