 The students in the advanced leadership class, Leadership Studies 450 engage with me three days a week in a seminar type format. And in that format, we have conversations about planning for their discussion sessions and what is on their agenda and how they're going to approach the event. We try to think of contingencies for how they'll respond to the various challenges they may be providing to their students. We also do debriefing sessions, subsequent to their discussion sessions, and talk about issues that range from their need to feel that every student should be learning at the A-plus level to understanding that students have different priorities. And while it's important to facilitate student learning, you can't own the responsibility for the student's learning and the students have to take that on themselves, and that's part of the growth and learning process in itself, as well as learning about their role as a peer leader and how they need to be more tuned into issues such as boundary management and being able to still be accessible to their students, but also realize they're in a special role. The other thing that happens in the seminar is we bring, we have six events where we bring in outside experts on leadership. The 450 students all get an opportunity to meet with those people in an intimate situation where it's them and the guests, and they engage in a conversation that they determine what the topics are, and it becomes a very fulsome conversation that's a very special opportunity for them. Those speakers, those guests, also come to the large 101 section, but there it's more of a, you know, they're on the stage and the 101 students are in the tiered classroom. They have an assignment that's every other week that they have to turn in a self-reflection paper that, in which they analyze their own learning about being a peer leader, and what does that mean to them in terms of their own personal development with issues ranging from their need for structure and how that impacts student learning, their expectations of themselves and others, their own skills and needs for communicating and listening versus speaking and so on and so on, and that becomes a key learning point. At the end of the term, the 450 students also write a self-reflective paper that projects to sometime in the near-term future, say three to five years in which they look at, given what they learned in the course, what are the sorts of things that they need to be thinking about in order to move forward on their journey as leaders. The 450 students also serve in a very powerful role in helping the 101 students connect to their professional. If you can imagine the 101 students are predominantly freshmen, some sophomores and very few upper division students, and these freshmen have never really had the opportunity in a formal sense to communicate with a senior professional. The kinds of people that they've interacted with range from people who are working in government service in the diplomatic corps, overseas, to people who have their own adventure travel business, to people who have their own medical practice, to people who are ministers and pastors in their communities and their churches, to people who are senior executives in manufacturing industries and supply chain management, and also a non-for-profit organization. So these students have a pretty daunting task in talking to an adult who they've never met before in a structured format via the internet. The 450 students are put in a position where they're really supporting the student's ability to communicate with their professional in a way that's meaningful. That goes from everything, from coaching them to be confident in a personal level to helping them with their writing skills so that their email communication looks like professional writing as opposed to something we might see on a Facebook post or a Twitter post, and that's a big learning piece, and the 450 students are very much engaged in that, and we talk about that in the seminar. Also, the 450 students work with selected professionals whose job is to support other professionals who are engaged in this, so that if we see either one of the volunteer professionals is busy and they haven't responded to their student, the 450 student communicates with the volunteer coordinator who will then communicate with that professional to help them remember that their world is not on a 10-week schedule, and we know that, but the world of the university is, and they have responsibility to match up to their student. Similarly, if a student is having some difficulty, either with the technology or because of their schedule or whatever, and we find the student isn't responding to their professional, the 450 students' job is to help that student get back on track. Yeah, yeah, I felt empowered in the sense that I was trusted to be a leader, even though, in a sense, I was not much older, you know, and I think kind of what that class taught me is that age doesn't necessarily matter. It's the trust that is instilled in us and kind of the empowerment that we felt to say, like, you know, I think that you know enough or that you're in the process of learning enough that you are in a position to share. And I kind of learned that it's being in that teaching role didn't mean I knew everything, but it meant that I had had the experiences to kind of facilitate further growth for others and for myself. I wasn't expecting to learn as much as I did in that class, but I was learning just as much, if not more, than the people that I was teaching and I was learning from them, which I wasn't expecting. So that was really cool.