 For me, the funniest and most interesting positive outcome from this experience is that the students in the 101 class in their final paper will write things like, gosh, I didn't realize that what we're learning in the textbook is what happens out in the world at large. I think the peer learning really helps them understand that there is a connection and having the advanced students support that is really powerful in that regard because it enables those students to connect with their mentors, their volunteer professionals. Another piece that comes out that I think is a real positive outcome is the amount of self-efficacy that develops with these students. By the end of the course, they're very comfortable in speaking to people who are at high levels, people who are professionals. It's really noticeable when you, if you could watch the class when we bring in guest speakers, towards the beginning of the class, the students are very hesitant, they're very cautious about volunteering to ask a question. By the end of the term, they're very open, they're much more confident in themselves. And to be quite frank, questions are very sophisticated. And to a person, every guest speaker who's come away from the class has been very much impressed with that. The third thing is the outcome is that there's a sense of community that develops in the discussion sessions that comes out of the work of the 450 class. And it's a community that's not just about being friends, it's a community that's focused on learning and learning about leadership. The sense of community that developed because it was 20 students, so we would start with some kind of like a clip or an icebreaker. And so we would try to do something that would connect them and get them to know each other as a community, but also have get them connected to us too and just in sharing. I guess kind of building a foundation of trust every week by doing these activities and then having small group discussions is what kind of made the dialogue powerful at times. Initially students are fairly neutral about the value of peer learning and learning from their more senior students. I don't think there's anything specific that says that they are enthusiastic about it or on the other hand resistant towards it. For some students I believe they initially are a little wary that oh my gosh this is just another student and it's not an instructor, so maybe the student won't know what's happening and so on and so forth. I think that you learn a lot from people that aren't in that, you know you don't look at them as necessarily in that professor's standpoint and although Dr. Garcia does make it himself really approachable and things like that, learning from your peers you just get a whole wider span of information and it just runs your horizons. For the first session I sat in and essentially gave credibility to the extent I can do that, I gave credibility to the 450 student as the person in charge. And we jointly conducted some icebreaker exercises and we worked together and modeled the fact that we could all learn from one another in that setting. I felt that just getting to know each other and breaking that ice with each other was a really really effective way to build that cohesion and get everyone moving towards the same goal when everyone respects and cares for each other and wants each other to succeed because they know each other and they care for each other, I find that that's a lot easier and you can do that through icebreakers or just getting to know each other in general and genuinely caring about each other. They're very anxious about not offending someone and that gets in the way of providing feedback and as we know without feedback you can't learn and we had some exercises in class including a quiz. The students answer the quiz individually in the discussion session and then they break up into a group of five and in that small group they answer the quiz again as a group quiz and the group score is the score that actually gets recorded for them. It was kind of a way of doing some peer pressure and developing I think some agency and self-responsibility towards the reading and towards doing the work in class. So it kind of made everybody accountable by the way he did that quiz and you know they'd be so excited if they did really well and if they didn't do so well you could see that within the group sometimes there was a little bit of ribbing not in a bad way but I think it did cause students to want to step up and do the work in the large class because they didn't know exactly who they'd be grouped with. We would have them count off in numbers so that was really great. The discussion session leaders debrief the group quiz as a group dynamics and leadership activity. So it was more than just a quiz on paper and knowing the concepts from the textbook. The students at first really struggled with how do they deal with the feedback that came from that discussion about their ability to be committed to working for the benefit of the group, their ability to provide information and what their communication structure was and so on and so forth. I think by the end of the term people were far more comfortable in both giving and receiving feedback and providing feedback in a way that was behaviorally based and not person based such that the performance of the group would be enhanced. I feel that as the weeks went on I noticed more how much I was learning through others. After I experienced that peer learning and after I experienced learning from all these other people and learning from my professionals and my mentors I realized that that is a way better approach to it in my opinion that it's a lot easier to learn through not only text and not only lecture but actual people who have been there, people who have experienced it and your peers who can bring examples to the table and it just filled in all the empty spaces for me.