What I have learned...that I wish I had known before - Part 2!

Happy Friday, Academic Mentors! 

We had the Lead Academic Mentors, who facilitate Peer Learning groups, brainstorm answers to the following question:

"What have you learned as lead AM that you wish you would have known as academic mentor?"
 
Below are the final two responses. Let us know what you think in the comment section of this post! Feel free to look back on the earlier post, where four other Lead Academic Mentors answered this same question.

1) As a lead academic mentor, I've learned how to more effectively work with students in a group, using their strengths and weaknesses to build sessions where they can lean on each other for knowledge and support. As an academic mentor, I frequently worked with paired sessions, and I wish I would have done more training dealing with how to work with students in groups and maximizing their ability to help each other. -Monica (Chemistry)

2) One thing I have learned from being a peer mentor is that having the right attitude about school will be reflected in how well students do in class. During practice tests that I give, when students get to a more long or more challenging question I will sometimes hear "I give up" or "I don't know". But if I ask them questions about just aspects of the problem and tease out the answer from them, we both usually find out that they knew the question all along they just needed to think more critically about it. I think while convincing students to study a lot is important, I do also think convincing students that they can answer difficult questions is just as important. My goal is to get a student to go from "This is such a hard question, there is no way I can answer this" to "okay this is hard, let me try to read this problem to find the important aspects of the question and come up with a reasonable answer." -Andy (Biology)

Hope you all have a great weekend!