Students Helping Students (SHS) are peer mentoring programs at Deakin University where trained and experienced students help other students to become more confident and independent learners. Two of these programs I was involved with were Peer Assisted Study Sessions (PASS) and Maths Mentoring. Knowledge is power, and I believe a sign of an effective leader is in their ability to effectively share this knowledge and help others grow to similar heights from it. I’ve been given many opportunities through these programs to demonstrate and refine my mentoring capabilities to help the Deakin community and build the confidence of students with their studies and their own capabilities, as I’ll elaborate below.

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PASS LEADER

PASS are free online group study sessions in tough units hosted by a student who successfully completed the unit. PASS is open to all students, those that are struggling, doing ok, or high achievers. I became a PASS leader for the subject ‘Engineering Physics’ at the start of second year (2021) and held this position until the end of trimester 1 2023. I was invited to take on this role after completing the unit in first year with high grades, and given my enthusiasm for mentoring, applied for it. In this role I prepared and hosted 50 minute bi-weekly online study sessions, put up regular posts in the Facebook group each week, and helped aid other leaders with large attendance and offering feedback.

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Planning and preparing the content for these sessions was initially difficult as it was new to me. However, drawing from my own experiences from the unit, it was a great asset that I was a student too as I was able to generate relevant and useful tips and tricks to my peers. It was rewarding to learn I was having a positive influence on the capabilities of the mentees when we would have a look at an originally challenging topic like projectile motion and by the end of the session have them commenting “it really isn’t as bad as I thought it was”.

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Hosting these sessions required a high level of emotional intelligence to discern the appropriate pacing of sections, managing group communications, and asking thoughtful questions that would initiate discussion amongst peers. This was a learning journey for myself as well and instead of assuming the quality of the session, I would seek regular feedback from the mentees at the end of each session to determine improvements and relevant topics for the following weeks material. Being a PASS leader, it was important to receive feedback to see what my weaknesses were, and act on improving them to the benefit of those I was helping, and to my own capabilities. One such recommendation was to implement a quiz to the session activities whereby everyone had a fair chance to attempt and answer the questions. To achieve this, it was important to have the organisational skills required to be able to prepare this content ongoingly and demonstrate to my peers the dedication I had to the program and them. Using Mentimeter I was able to generate custom quizzes with questions of increasing difficulty. What I noticed from these conscious efforts was an improvement in attendance, engagement, and a stronger understanding from my mentees. By choosing to lead by example and show commitment to the cause of study and my peers, I was able to generate enthusiasm towards the program, have my peers wanting to better themselves consistently throughout the trimester, and improving their grades, as the PASS coordinator - Noam Perl-Gurovich - can confirm.

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MATHS MENTOR

In 2022 I applied for, and successfully gained the position of Maths Mentor and have been involved till present. This is a SHS service that has proficient math students’ mentor other students in need of better understanding maths concepts and building their confidence with mathematics. I’ve partaken in mostly online sessions where students pop into the zoom call to share their math related problems and we mentor them towards a solution.

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The focus is to mentor and not tutor, as it better empowers students to become stronger learners. I’ve been given many opportunities to contribute to this development in others as Maths Mentors coordinator - Tom Petsinis can confirm. One of my core strategies has been to be thorough and methodical with my questioning. Often a student will come into a session saying they are stuck or not sure how to do a question and from here I usually press them towards finding a first step to resolving this or to justifying their reasons such as “Why have you chosen to use this method?”, “Explain the question to me”, “What’s the very first step you’d take to solve this question?”, “Is there a question similar to this that’s popped up in your notes?” etc. and from here the student is forced to critically think and actively participate in resolving their problem and/or justifying their steps. This helps to uncover to themselves where their knowledge is currently at, and it also informs me on which areas we might need to target to build up to resolving their overall problem.

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However, through my experiences I’ve found that mentees aren’t always forthcoming unless they feel they are in a supportive environment to share and learn. Some of my key behaviours to help cultivate this has been encouragement, patience, and empathy. I’ll often hand out praise whenever the mentee is able to determine the next step forward or hazard a good guess “you’re definitely on the right track, what’s something else we could try?”. I demonstrate patience in a variety of ways such as being non-judgemental, a willingness to break things down to more foundational levels, and spending ample time towards resolving the problem. Empathy is considered one of our strongest utilities as being a student ourselves, we can relate and share our similar experiences we have gone through when we learnt those particular topics. This humanises the experience and makes other students feel more at ease for knowing that it is normal to find a particular topic challenging etc. and can bring relief and inspiration to stick it out. By employing these methods it has resulted in students leaving the sessions feeling much more confident, appreciative that they weren’t just given the answer, and more capable at handling similar problems in the future.

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Honesty and integrity have been two other important traits that have served me well in this role. When confronted with topics I have no experience in, I am upfront about my capabilities and offer them alternative days to come back when a relevant maths mentor is on, out of respect for their time. Integrity is important when it comes to avoiding breaching academic integrity and giving students an unfair advantage with their assignments. To avoid this outcome, I’ve found it’s easiest to establish to mentees from the beginning the services that we do and don’t provide and to not be afraid to ask the student if it is an assignment question that they need help with. If with good reasoning and suspicion, it’s believed to be then I’ll address it in the moment, respectfully refuse to help with this particular problem and provide alternative ways in which we can help or direct them elsewhere. If it gets escalated due to tight deadlines and the stress of university, I remain composed, iterate to them our boundaries, and work towards having them leave if they begin being disrespectful.

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Mentoring hasn’t just been restricted to students though and has extended to fellow math mentors who were new to the role. From my experiences and the skills I had developed, I’ve also had several opportunities to share this knowledge and empower new members to the team like Christina Ekanayake. This was achieved by listening to their thoughts on the role and their approaches, offering some suggestions, demonstrating, encouraging when they mentored and only assisting when necessary, and providing feedback. By showing interest and guiding them they felt less intimidated and more comfortable with the role. I'd also often initiate discussions with my peers to reflect and exchange our different mentoring approaches to help each other to grow through suggestions as was the case with Katie.  

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CLUEY LEARNING

I found I enjoyed mentoring so much I also joined the Cluey Learning team at the beginning of 2022 and ending in October 2022 when I did my engineering internship over the summer break. This was a mixture of one-on-one sessions, group sessions, or student with parent sessions, all done online. By having a more advanced level of mathematics, it was even more critical to approach these sessions with patience and a genuine interest to help grow people’s passion for the subject. Knowledge is power, and I believe to be a good leader it’s important to nurture others capabilities no matter where they are at and avoid cruel commentary which can extinguish their flame and self-confidence.

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What I noticed was when I conveyed my passion and enthusiasm for math by showing the student slightly more in-depth applications and usefulness, they also became more interested and inspired, and were eager to come back. I employed the skills I had learnt from my other mentoring roles and found that similarly that it’s important to be adaptive with communication and visuals to land on an approach that would click for them. I liked to treat these sessions as confidence boosters. I never wanted to have the student leaving more confused than when they came, and a strategy to achieve this was to focus on the areas that they were comfortable with and build from there with more progressively challenging ideas/problems. Helping them fill in the gaps and having them realise they are more capable than they believe themselves to be, was a very rewarding experience. I noticed that from my enthusiasm and vested interest I was able to maintain a consistent turn out and the students became more interested to learn more and improve their grades.

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The Deakin mentoring experiences and tutoring roles I have held over my degree have highlighted to me the influence that someone can have in a position of greater perceived knowledge. I’ve come to better understand the responsibility of being in this position and learnt what's achievable when I cultivate a positive learning environment where everyone feels comfortable to share, learn and grow. An effective leader shares knowledge, nurtures the learning of others, and is prepared to learn from them as well. I'm proud to have been able to help and learn from so many diverse people, and ignite more passion towards their studies, mentoring abilities, and critical thinking capabilities.

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