As a Leadership Consultant this year, I have had the great opportunity to work with many different people and groups. I have worked not only with undergraduate students, but also international students, Mason LIFE students, and people from the areas surrounding George Mason University. It has been a great learning experience for me and has taught me not to always expect things to go as planned. I have become more flexible when facilitating a workshop and even in planning for one. Even if I have facilitated the same activity many times before, every single time it never goes the exact same way. One clear example that I can think of is with an activity called the Marshmallow Challenge. The Marshmallow Challenge engages groups to create the tallest structure they can using only tape, string and spaghetti. At the very end of the teams building time, they place one Marshmallow on top of their structure.
During the Fall semester, I facilitated this activity twice with a different co-facilitator each time and a different groups of students. One of the groups was actually a group of students who were in a class that met for three hours once a week. Most, if not all these students were native English speakers and had probably done an activity similar to the Marshmallow Challenge before. In the other facilitation of the Marshmallow Challenge, the students were all international students enrolled in the English language program. The way these two different groups took on the Marshmallow Challenge was completely different. Also, the way that we had to present and explain the challenge itself was completely different. This had to do with different English levels, different cultures, and the way those cultures showed themselves in the activity. The students of the three hour class pretty much created the same type of structures that I had seen before (though there were still some very unique structures), but all of the international students structures were different than I had ever seen before.
A big part of the Marshmallow Challenge is that usually teams place the marshmallow on the top at the very end, causing the collapse of their structure. None of the international student’s structures fell. While they might not have been the tallest, they were the sturdiest. I found this really interesting and I think that it showed me to not expect the same results even with an activity I have played or facilitated before. I think it shows how differently people can face challenges and find ways to overcome them. Overall, having the opportunity to be an LC has allowed me to have these insights of knowledge because of the experience of working with so many different people. It has really helped me learn to be flexible and thoughtful in my approach to facilitating and planning activities.