At the beginning of the semester, I decided that I wanted to learn more about leadership. I began researching different books that I could reach about leadership and how they would help me. As I began to look more into the books, I began to want to teach other what I had learned as well, so I reached out to Dr. Kastner to see if I could be in charge of running the Pre-approved experience for being a TA.
Before the spring 2018 semester began, I started reading the books, and gathering articles and TED talks that would be of interest to the students involved in the pre-approved experience. I began forming question and passages for them to read. This process really made me reflect on what leadership was, and how I could use it. These questions were then used during the semester in group discussion. The students would get the article and have a week to read the article and answer the questions. During our meeting we would then discuss their answers and reflect together on how the article, passage or video could help us become better leaders (See the document below for all the reflections that were created for the semester).
As the Head TA, I wrote a journal article weekly on how the experience was going, what obstacles I may have in the future, and what we did for the week. These weekly journals allowed me to see if I was being effective at leading the meetings, or if I needed to change my style. This year we had three students that were involved in the pre-approved experience, so group discussion was harder to begin than it would have been in previous years where there was five to eight people involved (See document below for weekly journal reflections). Throughout the semester I also worked with Dr. Kastner, to work on a list of reflections that would help him run the experience, if there was only a couple students again for the next semester.
Throughout the experience I learned more about leadership than I had from my previous honors experience. I personally learned about emotional intelligence and how it is important in the work place as well. I learned that most leaders that are struggling normal lack emotional intelligence leadership styles. I think the biggest take back to what I learned throughout both books that I read, is that leadership styles change based on the situation, so you have to know how to use multiple leadership styles, and know when and how to use these leadership styles.