Mentoring Program Overview
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The Middle-Grades Science Mentoring Program is a model program for the development and support of middle-grades science mentor teachers. Using Massachusetts as a field site, the project team—composed of science educators, scientists, and mentoring specialists—helped a group of 18–24 experienced science teachers to improve their skills, knowledge, and confidence so they could work effectively with new science teachers from mentor schools or districts. Forty-eight district administrators and principals also participated. The project’s goal was to develop teachers’ capacity to teach standards-based science.
Mentors—selected by their schools or districts on the basis of classroom performance and experience, ability to work with adult learners, and interpersonal skills—had the opportunity to improve their own science content knowledge, pedagogical skills (particularly around inquiry instruction), and mentoring capabilities. They became part of a larger network of educators who, like they, were perceived as role models and educational leaders for those just coming into middle-grades science teaching at a critical period in public education.
For the mentors, the core program included science institutes, planning/observation/conferencing sessions with the new middle school science teachers, and a study-group series. The institutes involved serious study, emphasizing science content that was aligned with national and local standards. Adult inquiry experiences, nested in selected hands-on curriculum units, provided the institute’s focus for improving mentors’ understanding of content and pedagogy and for helping the mentors reflect on their own practices and notions of teaching and learning. Institutes also offered opportunities for developing mentoring skills (such as communicating effectively, goal setting, and scripting observations during classroom visits) and trying out mentoring strategies and tools.
Mentors
put into practice some of the institute learnings when they provided support
to their mentees in the form of co-planning and articulating their understandings
about science teaching when providing feedback. In fact, together the mentor
and mentee engaged in a wide variety of activities to improve the quality
of instruction.
CSE staff, with feedback from the mentees, developed a framework for thinking about inquiry instruction, specifically the elements of the inquiry learning cycle and infrastructure. The inquiry protocol has many uses as a resource. It can help:
- mentees better understand the inquiry approach to science teaching and learning,
- mentees plan an inquiry science lesson,
- mentors plan their own inquiry science lesson,
- mentors/mentees during pre-observation conferences to discuss what part of the inquiry learning cycle the mentor will observe the mentee teach, and
- the mentor and mentee debrief a classroom observation during a post-observation conference.
Independent evaluators of our program have indicated that mentors believed
the work they did impacted considerably on their mentees’ level of
confidence, followed closely by improved science teaching and improved use
of science inquiry in the classroom. To a slightly lesser degree, mentors
thought their work had helped their mentees’ science content understanding
to improve as well as their mentees’ practice of ongoing assessment
of student learning.
According to evaluators, in terms of the impact of the project on mentors:
“Mentors seem to have made significant strides in improving their understanding of science content and the inquiry-based approach. They expressed shifts in their understanding of what “true” inquiry really is as a result of project participation, expressing an appreciation of inquiry as more than just hands-on activities.”
The model has been adapted to other sites: the program has been used as an all—district program, tailored for mathematics, and tested with elementary science mentors.
Many of the pieces developed throughout the life of this project will be available through a publication in development, to be published by NSTA Press. Check back here for a publication date.
