On Friday, October 26, multiple peer tutoring and mentoring departments from across the university came together for the Peer Tutor & Mentor Summit, an annual day of collaboration, free food, and professional development. The summit is also one of the Outreach Team’s biggest events every year.
This year, the summit’s theme was Piloting Your Peer Journey. Everything centered on presenting advice to peer tutors and mentors through the lens of pilots embarking on a travel adventure.
One of the most collaborative aspects of the summit each year is the round robins that take place. Tutors and mentors from all different departments created interactive activities and group discussions that used elements of this year’s theme to get participants thinking about their tutoring and mentoring skills.
UCWbLers presented three different round robins during this year’s summit.
Taking an Alternate Route to Your Destination
The Outreach Team led a round robin about different paths we can take to arrive at a destination. In this activity, participants received a picture of an airplane, and were told to draw an airplane based on that picture, but with one catch—they had to both view and draw the airplane upside down. After everyone finished their drawings, we discussed how people felt while trying to complete this challenge, and how that could relate to tutoring.
Many participants said that they felt nervous while drawing their airplanes, but then when they flipped them rightside-up, they liked their picture a lot better than they thought they would. We discussed how looking at a problem from a new perspective can sometimes lead us to new conclusions we didn’t previously know were possible.
The morning session of this round robin was led by me, Meredith M, and Charlotte B, and the afternoon session was run by Caroline J, Kate M, and Marin S.
Tutoring and Mentoring Our Friends from Across the Globe
Fellow UCWbLer and Workshops Team GA Katharine R also led a round robin at the summit! Katharine’s Round Robin, called “Tutoring and Mentoring Our Friends from Across the Globe,” focused on strategies for working with students from other countries and making them feel at home in our academic community.
She led an activity where participant pairs were given phrases from other languages that have no direct translation in English. One partner 
had to describe the word, while the other had to guess the meaning. The activity was intended to show the perspective of someone learning a new language. In addition, tutors and mentors learned that learning is a social, conversational activity, and that they make a world of difference in supporting their tutees and mentees in their transition to their new academic discourse community.
When Emotions Fly High
The third UCWbL round robin came from Head Writing Center Tutors Kaitlyn M and Laurel J. In their round robin, participants were put into pairs and assigned the role of “flight attendant” or “passenger.” Then, each pair had to deal with a hypothetical scenario on the airplane from each perspective. Through this role-play, participants discovered new ways to handle unexpected situations when tutoring.
At the end of the day, we finished up the summit with a reflection activity called “Your Peer Packing List.” Everyone wrote down their takeaways of the day: the pieces of knowledge they’d pack with them when embarking on their peer journey. Overall, this summit was a smooth flight with a successful landing.
