 That peer learning experience is that kind of one-room schoolhouse experience where some people have a lot more photo experience, and so that's shared. That's all about teaching them to be teachers, essentially, and to share information. I constantly encourage them to help out one another, especially in the dark room. If you see someone struggling, making a contact sheet, why? If you're better at Lightroom 4, why would you keep that under your hat? You know, and so you'll see them in the lab side-by-side and sharing experiences. I think that's one of the most important parts in Garth's classes, really, because, I mean, we only have one Garth, so there's a lot of peer learning that is going on, and people come in with all different sorts of experience. Some people took photo in high school, or some people are just getting in the dark room for the first time. I think we're really dependent on the people with more knowledge and who are willing to teach other people. And so if you share your experience, it gives you confidence in what you're doing, and it kind of solidifies your own passions, too, and solidifies your own beliefs in terms of learning and your own truth. And so the one-room schoolhouse is something I really encourage, because that exchange and dialogue is so important. Well, we're not always going to have a teacher, and so having a dialogue with your peers just makes sense because if you support your peers, your peers are supporting you. Like, after college is gone, like, that's pretty much what you have. I did not come to peer learning directly. Peer learning turned out for me to be a solution to a challenge, and the challenge I had was dealing with a class that's about leadership and trying to connect leadership to practice. So peers became instrumental to that, and that led to the creation of a 400-level course where we had discussion session leaders, and the 450 students work with the 101s in developing their ability to both engage in conversations with their professionals, as well as develop their own learning around leadership within the 101 class, as well. Structure the model, if you can imagine, looks like a diamond, and at the peak of the diamond are the students in the 101 class. At the bottom of the diamond are the students in the 450 class, their peer facilitators. On the right hand point of the diamond are the professionals who are working professionals and give practical information about leadership, and the left-hand side of the diamond is the instructor, me. We all come together around the learning around leadership. I provide a theoretical and research basis and offer guidance for both the 450 students and the 101 students, though the professionals provide learning for the 101 students, but also connect with the 450 students, and so far as the 450 students facilitate and support their interactions, and the 450 students work with the 101s in developing their ability to both engage in conversations with their professionals, as well as develop their own learning around leadership within the 101 class, as well. So that model seems to be working, and it's really exciting to participate in, and the students are really engaged. 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 texts, 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 yeah, it just, it filled in all the, all the empty spaces for me. Leadership shows up in anything. You can be a leader by being a follower, you can be a leader with a title, but you don't have to have a title. We went from learning concepts with Joe in a lecture, to having hands-on experience, more one-on-one time with leaders who knew a little bit more where Joe was coming from, so we were able to discuss that more with them and get more of an in-depth look at the concepts. I started finding my own voice because I was able to practice the concepts in a safe environment, which our 450 students provided for us, so it was that feeling that I was having a voice and I was learning how to be a leader in my own way, and so that's when I started feeling this larger passion for leadership and wanting to pursue it more and having other students feel the same way. As I was thinking about creating exercises within the branding course that would bring together this previous learning new learning and enhance student comprehension of the principles, it occurred to me that me as talking had was absolutely the worst possible approach and students were actually the very best spokespeople of the assimilation process. A lot of times this sort of education is more valuable than the professor telling us something. I have my own opinion of how I feel my presentation went or I feel my paper went, but it's interesting to see how my peers may have different opinions. The professor we view as having a different standpoint, having a different intellect, whereas the peers we assume have similar intellects and similar knowledge as us, so I think it was definitely valuable. My job as I see it as an instructor is then to design as many and as many reality-based exercises as possible to bring those principles together. The first thing is that you teach students what a creative brief is and then you ask them to produce one as a team. There's a side piece to that end and that is that in the marketing profession, but candidly I think in most professions today there is no such thing as a sole practitioner. Everything is team-based, organically gained teams working together to solve problems is so essential in today's world that I overemphasize if anything teamwork in my courses. So it's important to link that there's a skill it's called writing a creative brief and it is done in a team environment because number one you should get better work that way and number two it so strongly emulates the world of work that my students will be going into. To me it's almost like I start thinking how could I implement this type of a atmosphere into something that I could go forth and promote in the future. Yeah it was basically the framework that we could apply to any brand, any workplace. So definitely Professor Stone just opened to us a new world of possibilities as marketers, as professionals and that is very valuable. We should be gifting all of our students if at all possible to feel good about and understand how important it is. So that's why peer learning is an essential part of a curriculum process as you have people passing through their four or however many years we have the opportunity to work with them here at Western Washington so that they understand that this is a skill they'll be using for the rest of their lives.