11.15

at this moment in time, my question is...
How do mentors shift their practice of working with students? What type of feedback is most supportive? What are their biggest areas of need?

Being as specific as I can be, what I want my students (mentors) to learn and be able to do is...
Be responsive to student needs and challenge their students. I'd like them to make good connections with their students and engage them in learning. I'd like to see them using constructivist methods to encourage students to do their own work and participating actively in the session.

I'd be able to see them doing this by:
sharing the whiteboard
sharing the mic
students demonstrating interest and responding to surveys with positive reports
mentors asking open-ended questions
students are asking questions
overall improvement in their rubric scores by coaches (over time they move from a 1 to a 4, etc)
students stay in the program
positive response from parents

Data I could look at:
Rubrics from coaches/me
rubrics on student learning (research assistants)
surveys from students
surveys from parents
surveys from mentors
How many sessions students attend
conversations with students
student one page response (being done in one school, created by the teacher)
teacher survey
grades


Where I am now:
i have a number of assumptions that perhaps I should surface

• students who are actively involved in their learning learn more
• students who enjoy the program are learning more (this might not be true, how can I determine this or does it matter? Is it enough to enjoy the program?)
• mentors who use constructivist methods are more effective --that is, helping students learn thus see #1
• mentors can improve in their methods
• content is less important than pedagogy (this one is a tricky one, because meeting the students at their academic and developmental level is one of the biggest challenges and something I think I should help them with. However, being able to determine the level that students are on is part of pedagogy, I think.

I wonder if mentors need some sort of assessment to do with kids. Something like the Marilyn Burns k-2 math assessment that is done one on one where you really get a better picture of where kids are. Obviously, something like that for algebra.

I think I need to continue to look for improvement in constructivist methods.
I think I should also look at student learning in some way and see if that is improving. I have research assistants using a separate rubric, so we could take that as reliable and look over time and see if that student is improving in their learning. The only issue with that is I'm not giving any feedback to students, so is it fair to use their shift as a way of grading mentors. That's like what they did in L.A. and seems kind of unfair.

What I think could be interesting would be to see if students improve over time in terms of their grades and if that is at all correlated to the mentors that I believe improved based on my rubric. That may be putting too many levels. It might be enough just to look at the rubrics and see if the mentors improve and using what feedback. But that only tells me if they did it, not why or how. They're getting support in a couple of ways:
-coach feedback
-workshops
-new forum (if anyone starts using it)

I could get info from them about their own progress as mentors via
-weekly survey
-bigger surveys I send out
-phone calls and interviews

So there's how they think they're doing, how we think they're doing and how their kid thinks they're doing. Plus how their kid actually does in math and on our rubrics.

Phewsh, that's a lot of levels.