Education for You

So my first ed session of the morning on Saturday was Competency Guide for College Student Leaders, Brian Wooten was a great presenter... he's from the south, and I'm not gonna lie, if I had to actively listen to anything at 9am on a Saturday, his voice did the trick of keeping me engaged. The session was a little dry though, it was basically a run down of using 360 Evals, which we do (go us!). We covered the differences between Knowledge Sets (what we know), Skill Development (what we can do) and Disposition (what we feel/our attitudes of viewing life - i.e. how am I challenging others?). We picked a partner and went over our struggles/ achievements/what we're good at and what we need to work on and all that jazz. The guy I worked with was from a really small community college in NY, and was COMPLETELY different from us, so it was cool to see what they do compared to us. Since like 90% of their students are commuters, they have day events, and their programs are focused on social issues/community service type events, where ours are more for fun, so it was interesting to get the different outlook of their programming board.



Ed session numero dos was Retreat Planning & Officer Transition: A How-To Guide for Student Leaders and it was presented by 2 people from Lasell. It was really interesting because they utilized a December-December election process, whereas we do May-May. Also, their positions were elected by the student body, but then they changed the process to an application and then their "Matt Miller" reads & reviews them and decides who is selected for their EBoard. It was interesting to see the different officer transitions, but I like the way ours works! But I think I got a lot of tips and ideas on Retreat Planning, so I'm glad I went to that session. Overall, I think our retreat in February (tentatively on the 7th) will be a great success and hopefully we will be able to utilize some of the resources from this session (they are emailing out the presentation and a breakdown of their election and retreat process).
Here are the basic breakdown they gave of making sure you included everything in planning a retreat:

• Purpose (send out a pre-agenda to let them know what will be done)
• Criteria for success (what will be evaluated after retreat)
• Participants (why are they there?)
• Location (is it good lighting, seating, heat/ac, will everyone be comfortable for the amount of time spent in the room)
• Equipment (does the room have it, does it need to be brought?)
• Time Spent (running retreat, organizing retreat -> gboard votes on date)
• Facillitator (who will be speaking/running the meeting, are other organizations involved?
• Budget (how much will be spent? spent on what)
• Minutes (recording what happened just like a normal meeting to keep everyone informed even if they didn't attend)
• Theme?
• Personal Commitment (is it required?)

After the retreat they have the gboard and eboard evaluate the retreat to make sure it was successful based on the pre-retreat purpose and criteria.

Love me some ed-seshs

-Rachel