Expert mentoring system

Petrea Redmond, lecturer in Education, provides an expert mentoring system and a model of ICT integration through discussion groups.

Description

Petrea uses practising teachers to mentor her pre-service student teachers in an asynchronous online message-board environment. She invites guests, who have discipline and pedagogical expertise in high school teaching, to mentor students in groups on questions relating to their field, such as curriculum knowledge, pedagogical and assessment issues, and examples.
Petrea also holds focussed online book-discussion groups that are cross-course, cross-discipline, cross-campus and cross-institution. The idea is to create a common experience for student teachers – for example, reading a particular novel with their class at school – and to use this as the basis for their own collaborative work.

Target audience

The discussion groups are used on EDU 3473 and SEC 2505 and SEC 2506. They are a compulsory component of the courses. Student participation in the online area is formally assessed.

Learning goals/objectives

The use of experts is designed to give students the best possible mentoring, and is only made feasible across the campuses and institutions by use of technology, which solves problems that might otherwise be insurmountable – e.g. budget, time, teaching space and so on.
The book-discussion groups are designed to provide models of ICT integration in teaching and learning. Students gain experience that they can use in their own teaching – for example, skills of communication, group-working and sharing of information.

Roles

The lecturers involved in the development of these programmes were Petrea Redmond, Steve Hughes and Jennifer Lock.
Experts were located and brought onboard by word of mouth, personal contacts and email approaches.

Results

The mentoring programme has been run twice, and the only real modification was that instead of leaving the forum completely open from the beginning, some starter questions were used to begin the discussion each week. The groups were also reduced in size so that no mentor had more than 20 students in their group. The experts did choose to come back for the second run, and Petrea says part of the reason for this was that she was able to express appreciation to them for their efforts, by buying them small thank-you gifts with an internal research grant. Copies of the novels used for the book discussion groups were also subsidised.

Problems and advice for others

Petrea has found that it's only by carrying out these projects that she's discovered the bugs and glitches and how to deal with them, and that it's an ongoing process. But she says she's had fantastic support from the students and the projects are working well. Some students will only participate to the absolute minimum level necessary, but others have embraced the initiatives with enthusiasm. Petrea has found that individual threads of conversations occasionally peter out on the message boards, and need to be kept going, which can be done with just a little extra encouragement.

General recommendations

For staff considering a similar project, Petrea recommends taking a flexible approach and being prepared to prod, probe and encourage participation, whilst monitoring the boards.