Spring 2022: Part 1 of becoming an honors Peer Educator is complete!

Above: Our UCar group entertaining ourselves while waiting for the ferry

When I started this class, I was excited to learn solid teaching skills for leading a group of students. I was inspired by my Peer Educator who had led me in an Honors 100 class earlier this year. They were a big part of helping me enter into UW and helping me feel like I belonged here. I want to help in that experience for other freshmen. As for my teaching skills, my confidence in my abilities to make a lesson plan or lead a class for a full hour was shaky. However, my reservations didn’t keep me for long. Going to the peer educator retreat allowed everyone to get comfortable with each other. I felt very cared for as a person and thankful to be a UW student because of this. One of my favorite parts of the weekend was getting close to the people in my UCar, even though we missed the ferry by one car and we had to wait several extra hours. It’s a really sweet group of people we have here and this class allowed me to get a better picture of what the honors community looks like.

I think I also was able to develop a better understanding of the honors program as a whole because I got to see the source of all the preparation and curriculum. Learning from Claire and Nadra helped me to see the values that the UW honors program holds and how we implement those values. We did several activities that taught us about being better teachers, and that helped me become a more thoughtful facilitator and educator. Some activities we did included learning about leading icebreakers, caring for people and their mental health, inviting conversations about race and culture in the classroom, normalizing not knowing one’s exact career path, understanding and making a welcome space for all aspects of identity, and we continued doing activities like this in our weekly classes back at UW.

It really felt like the class was designed to bring us together in community. By the end, I found some really good friends who I know I will still be close with next year. At the beginning of this year, I never would have seen myself as someone who would be teaching a class. It’s been a welcome surprise to step into this role and slowly gain confidence in my ability to teach and be a learner at the same time. I am thankful we were able to go through lesson plan preparation and build our lesson plans this year so we will be ready for next year. The freshmen next year won’t know how much preparation it will take to meet them there, but I’ll be happy just to see them get adjusted to college life here at UW, knowing that they have an army of support.