Jack’s last post about engineers mentoring planners got me thinking about mentoring in education. I was involved in developing and coordinating a peer mentoring program when I served as a teacher for the Department of the Army in Sierra Vista Arizona in 2002- 2005. The schools on the military installation were elementary K-8th grade. The program matched older students with younger students in the after-school homework center. The program I’m happy to say, was a success. (I talk about this more in a commentary on Jack Reece’s Wildcat Blog).
The children in the program were all from military families. Many of the parents were deployed to Iraq, (there were several families in which BOTH parents were deployed at the same time. Remember when the United States declared “Shock and Awe” on Iraq in March of 2003? Well, a lot of kids said “good-bye” to Mommy and Daddy for a year or so.
Anyway, those of you who know anything about the Army, know that families get moved around a lot; the children end up attending many schools during the career of their parents. And to top it off, during a “War”, these children are without one or both parents for a year or more at a time.
The peer-mentoring program was one way our Children’s Services provided some support to the kids who really needed extra attention and assistance with their school work. The mentoring program benefited the children and the parents. I believe the act of mentoring is a noble and worthwhile endeavor when children are involved or when engineers or teachers are involved.
What I wanted to share with you today is a website about a technology integration project done by Towson University in Maryland. The full project name is The Towson University Mentoring to Master Technology Integration Project (MM-TIP) and was a federally funded grant sponsored under the Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology (PT3) Program.
http://www.towson.edu/tip/
What interested me about this project was the “mentoring” factor. The project used a “faculty-to-faculty mentor/protégé professional development model” to support technology in the classroom.
The ultimate goal of this project was to use faculty who were proficient at technology integration, creative at integrating technology into their teaching, and model this integration to pre-service teachers.
The active project period of this grant was 07/01/2001 – 06/30/2004. The research and analysis of project data collected was conducted through 06/30/2005. I plan to locate this information and will share with you in my next post.
Thank you once again to Jack for your post! It helped to direct me to the Towson study!
Diane
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2 comments:
Diane
I would be interested in the outcome of the study. I didn't come through the traditional teacher prep program. Career Tech teachers have a different pathway. All of us in the program were already teaching full-time and in essence, we were mentoring each other throughout the program. However, for those not yet in the classroom it can be overwhelming. Planning lessons, classroom management, discipline, rubrics, parental contact, alphabetizing those strange last names,.... Oh, and then there's the actual teaching!
At Wheeler, we mentor the new teachers. We have a new teacher program that meets monthly. If they are brand new then it's more involved. If they are experienced, then it's more of a 'buddy" to help with submitting grades, problems, where does this go, etc.
JR
Hi Diane. I like the faculty to faculty mentoring project. At our school we are beginning to implement peer coaching, and our school is even starting to allow the use of peer coaching as a replacement for formal evaluations!
It would be great to form peer coaching technology groups!
~Michelle
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