1.18.11

In prep for the meeting I wanted to get some thoughts on paper.

In the past couple of weeks I've had 7 kids drop out. I'm trying to get exact reasons for their dropouts from them via a questionnaire. Here are my guesses.
-many who dropped were switched around a lot or had trouble connecting with their mentor [stability and support are really important. How can we make sure they get the info they need? New system will prob. help with that.]

-there is a social element to this. The school that has had the least amount of dropouts is Vallemar, where they come with their friends, they do their session for an hour, and then they leave together. It's not an isolated event for them that they have to go to. [putting kids together with their friends could be really important in terms of getting them to stick with it.]

-stds with low math ability are having a hard time. I think that's because they're not experiencing success online, which is even harder to experience than in person. Mentors are smart, possibly too smart, and don't really know what its like to not understand math. Sometimes I think the best math teachers are ones who aren't as good at math. [how to train mentors to work with low skilled kids???

-relationship is important. [should there be a monthly get together? Is there a way to improve connection between mentors and students? Emails? Guided questions? ]


Other thoughts that I have surround objectives for our program which I think will stem from some of my learning. Should it be around student retention, say a percentage? Should it be around student joy, appreciation for math/science at a certain percentage? Should it be their grades improving? STAR test scores? We need something to focus on for student improvement.

For mentor improvement my goal is around increasing their constructivist practices. I want to see an improvement in their scores on the rubric. But I also have the belief that if they are more constructivist, their student's engagement will go up, along with their learning, and thus we'll see an improvement across a lot of the areas where i'm collecting data: grades, student surveys, rubrics on st. learning, etc. Am I too convoluted?