Blog #2

I really appreciated the handouts from ELI, especially the one with all of the feedback from past participants and facilitators. It was good to get so much perspective and so many new ideas, while also learning some key what-not-to-dos. I got an idea for my most recent Chat Café from it: writing questions on cards, putting them in the center of the circle, and, going around the table, drawing a card to read and answer. This led to some very interesting responses, as well as discussion around the table after the initial person had given their response. We discussed everything from food (everyone wants to try cuisine from other cultures!) to study habits. The cards created structure and kept it moving, but there was still natural discussion around the table. Picking the card felt more like a game than a forced conversation, especially since we had written them ourselves! This actually surprised me a little, and made me think about "genuine" conversation in a new way. I think that genuine conversation can be had in infinitely many ways, but it is characterized by being enjoyable to all the participants. I think that to foster such conversation in my groups, it's important for me to have a plan and backups to the plan to make sure the conversation never stops. However, I should never stop natural discussion that is flowing away from the original plan because this is how real conversation works. I will direct the conversation back to the original plan if the conversation slows or stops. 

ELI visit

I learned so much from the ELI visit to our class. I was given very helpful feedback on what I can do to improve and what things I should recommend to the students. For example, I didn't realize that TV shows are not a good way to get better at learning a language by ear. However, there are YouTube videos, clubs, and other things that can make a student feel more comfortable with their linguistic abilities.

The other strategy that was touched on in class was the question rebound: when someone asks a question, ask another person to respond to that question. This way, more people are getting involved in the group and speaking up. This fosters an inclusive atmosphere of camaraderie. I hope that this will encourage shier people to engage in the group and be more vocal.

It's also important to consider the entire group's needs. For instance, if one person wants to do presentation-type chats, that might not be representative of what everyone wants. It's so crucial to pay attention to group dynamics and put effort into making sure everyone is satisfied and content.

First Blog Post

I'm so excited to start working as a Chat Cafe leader! I also work at Sweetland as a peer writing consultant, and in the past I worked for the Science Learning Center as a study group facilitator; both experiences have helped prepare me, at least to some degree, for this next challenge. Whereas as a peer writing consultant, I help students with their written language, now I will be helping students with their verbal language skills. I think it will be very informative to compare and contrast the two positions and get a more multi-faceted view on language.

I'm a bit anxious about having silences in the conversation and navigating that occurrence. I feel like I'll be responsible to keep the conversation going when it lags or to revive it if it dies. I suppose I will have to drink a lot of coffee beforehand to ensure that I will be very chatty. It's helpful to understand that silence can be a natural and normal part of conversation, though. Not every second needs to be filled with chatter. Plus, silences give us an opportunity to really stretch our minds for something to say.

The reason I chose to be a Chat Cafe facilitator involves the desire to form connections with people I may never have gotten to know otherwise. It's always healthy to hear about perspectives and beliefs that differ vastly from your own; I think that's how we learn and get better, or at least learn to understand others. I also thought it would be interesting to explore the opposite of what I do at Sweetland Center for Writing which is instead of helping with written word, helping with orally expressed language.

All in all, I'm very excited to begin meeting new people and just having good conversation with them!

Blog #1

I am very excited to meet new people through the Chat Cafe, as well as share and discuss different cultures. After studying abroad in France this summer, and living and taking classes in a foreign language, I feel that I have an interesting perspective going into this. I'm excited to share cool things about Ann Arbor with my groups, such as restaurants and the Arb, as well as to learn about cultural differences between their home countries and the United States. I always found discussions like this my host family in France very interesting, and there's always so much to learn from other people! Of course, that is not all that I am excited to talk about. It will also be fun to talk about things like books, TV, food, and classes. All of these things, particularly the opportunity to meet new people and share new and exciting ideas, are what motivate me to be a Chat Cafe leader. I love to meet new people and learn from them, so Chat Cafe seems like an awesome opportunity to do that, all while helping to create a safe space for international students to practice their English.

On the other hand, I am nervous about having a very shy group, or having one person who really dominates the conversation. I really want everyone to be comfortable, both with me and with the other members of the group. Having a very shy group would be difficult because it would be very important for me to keep the conversation going and ask a lot of questions; however, I am confident that they would eventually warm up. Having one person always dominating the conversation would be a different challenge, but I think that my first approach to remedying that would be to ask direct questions to other members of the group who weren't talking as much. Despite these concerns, I am overwhelmingly excited to meet my groups and get started!

Chat Cafe End-of-Semester Update

On Friday, at our Chat Cafe session, a member of my group, Jinyu, asked if we could take a picture before going our separate ways.

This request--one that might seem simple or insignificant to someone else--meant a lot to me.  Jinyu wasn't prompted or egged on by me to commemorate our group's last meeting--instead, the idea was entirely hers, one that indicated to me that Chat Cafe meant something to her this semester.

My hope, of course, is that it meant something as well to other members of our group.  We had a solid 5 throughout most of the semester, and thankfully there was a great deal of chemistry within our group.  Jinyu, Xiwen, and Yang were all from Beijing, and bonded over that shared experience; Adam and Jinyu both had transferred from other universities, and were able to share perspective on the best way to navigate through UM; Xiwen and Yang loved to talk about the places they hoped to travel one day.  Conversations flowed freely through most of our sessions, which would often continue beyond our allotted time (which was fine by me--the discussions were fascinating!).

I hesitate, some, in making comparisons between my two Chat Cafe groups; both were great, in their own ways, and I feel very lucky to have had groups that both remained pretty committed to coming to sessions.  But I would say that this group probably had a greater interest in getting to know one another, whereas the last group probably was more interested in getting my insights about UM and America.  I noticed that this semester, many more conversations took place between pairs in a group, rather than with me at the center of them.  Whether this was because I was a better facilitator this time around or because of a difference in what my group members hoped to gain from Chat Cafe, I don't know.

I do know, however, that I appreciate the way things went this semester.  One of the things I've heard most often while facilitating is how isolating and lonely being an international student at UM can be.  Students have told me about how they worry about talking to their American roommates because of a language barrier, how lectures require them to translate the material from English to Mandarin, and then comprehend its academic meaning, how much they miss their families and their homes and their pets.  Watching the people in my group become friends this semester--I know several of them are friends on Facebook, and that a couple have gone to dinner with one another outside of our group--makes me hope that Chat Cafe might have made the experience at UM a little less lonely.  Beyond giving students the opportunity to practice their conversational English, I think the real value in Chat Cafe is how it gives international students the chance to feel like they are part of a community.

I'm sad to know that my time as a Chat Cafe facilitator has come to an end.  I'm happy, however, to have seen firsthand the way this program can create a stronger network of international students, and hopefully make their experience at UM better.  I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to take part in Chat Cafe, and am sure the program will continue to do great things in the future.

Chat Cafe: Part Deux

Before I talk about my experience as a second-time Chat Facilitator I would like to acknowledge why it is I signed up for round 2. After the first semester, although I spent a lot of time getting to know my participants, I felt as though I could better job at not only facilitating conversations but also creating relationships between the participants and myself. Also, this summer I will be going to India to facilitate a class of international students as they journey around the country, so I thought practicing and improving my facilitating skills would be beneficial to my summer internship.  So, from day one of “Chat Café Part Deuxs” I have had the active goal to use my experience from last semester to create a better learning platform for both my participants and myself.  That being said, this semester is completely different from my last semester. Last semester I had a regular group of 5 or 6 participants, this semester I have had a regular group of 3. Most of the time all 3 participants show up, however, there have been sessions with just 2 participants and on occasion, I have even gotten to experience a 1 on 1 session.  Another change from last semester to this semester is the rooming situation. Last semester my group only wanted to meet in one location for the whole semester, however, this semester, my participants have expressed interest in moving around campus each week for sessions. The first handful of weeks we moved from lounge to lounge around campus. This was a challenge for me. Each week I had to find the different lounge with the right environment to host a chat group. Eventually, I realized that I could reserve study rooms at the Shapiro library. The group loved the reserved room so much we just reserve a different room in Shapiro each week.

The main difference in my style from last semester to this semester is that I am much more flexible with my sessions now. Last semester I would try to come up with themes each week to generate topics. These themes ended up trapping the conversation and stunted natural conversation. This semester I come to each meeting with little to no preparation. Sometimes I will bring articles from the Michigan Daily in and we will talk about the general idea of the article, however, the article serves as a jumping off point for the conversation, not the main topic. One strategy I have used in both semesters is starting the meeting off with roses and thorns, basically, each member says something good about their week, ad something bad about their week. I usually use topics brought up from roses and thorns as jumping off points for the conversation. I just started using table topics in my facilitation as well. I learned about table topics from my time with a public speaking club called toastmasters. The idea of table topics is that a speaker is given a question like “talk about a time someone was nice to you, how did it make you feel?” then the speaker gives a quick speech for 30-60 seconds. After the speech, the person sitting on the left of the speaker give a constructive comment and the person on the right gives a compliment. I’ve adopted table topics to my group after asking them if they would be interested in that exercise. This week was the first implementation of table topics and my group really enjoyed it.

Apart from the small differences in my facilitating style, I would say the biggest difference is that I constantly seek feedback from my participants this semester. Usually, in the last 5 minutes of the meeting, I’ll ask my group if there is anything that I could do better or if they have any suggestions for next session. This constant feedback from my group has allowed me to try new techniques as well as improve my overall skillset as a facilitator.

Overall I was really on the edge about signing up for a second round of Chat Café, however, this semester has been really rewarding so far and I can't wait to see how both my group members and I grow. 

Chat Cafe: Winter Edition

I was pretty nervous about starting Chat Cafe again this semester.  My group from last fall had set the bar high--they were terrific, active participants who, by December, I considered to be friends.  So, naturally, I figured things would even out and I might not have such a great experience this time (eternal pessimist--isn't it charming?).  Boy, was I wrong.

My first two sessions of the semester were a tad unorthodox--at the first, three of the six people signed up for the group came, and at the second, the other three came (no one from the first session was able to attend).  Although initially dismayed by this (only two weeks in, and already half of the group can't make it--eek!), I realize in retrospect that this split, smaller group accident actually laid some really nice groundwork for us.  At those first two sessions, there was a degree of intimacy that can be difficult to establish in a group of seven in which no one knows each other.  Conversation flowed easily, we broke into pairs naturally and then came back together as a single group, and everyone became familiar with other people really quickly.  This was one of the things I was hoping would happen with the board game I created for my capstone project last semester--group members would become comfortable with just one other person, which would hopefully set them at ease with the group as a whole.  (To my slight disappointment, though, we didn't actually play the board game itself--I asked about it at the first two sessions, but no one really seemed interested, and because things were going well otherwise, I figured there was no reason to push.)

After these initial sessions, we've had pretty much full attendance--and like I hoped, the familiarity created in those first two meetings have really helped the group mesh as one.  Members are really talkative in this group, which I love--we've actually already had some really interesting discussions about Mandarin, the layout/architecture of Chinese cities, and Spring Festival.  It's interesting to me that this group seems to be a bit more open to talking about their lives before college than my previous one was--last semester, most discussions centered around life at UM and in the US, but this semester has had a bit broader reach.  I like that my two semesters facilitating have given a mix of discussion topics, because I feel that I've both been able to help familiarize students with some of the idiosyncrasies of American life and learned from them more about the world at large.

I'm looking forward to seeing what happens this semester--my gut tells me things are going to go well.  This group has great chemistry, and I love that I've gotten better at letting conversations flow where they will, rather than where I want them to go.  Last semester, Chat Cafe became a bright spot at the end of my week that helped pull me through school and work, and I have no reason to think it won't continue to be that.  It's exciting to spend time with my group, and I can't wait to see what conversations unfold in the coming weeks.