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By Michael Childs
mchilds@coe.uga.edu
An educational partnership that brings together high school mentor teachers, teacher educators and teacher students is not only developing better new math teachers, but is also providing a much-needed impetus for the growth and development of veteran teachers.
Developed by UGA’s mathematics education program and now in its second year, Partnerships and Reform in Mathematics Education--PRIME--now involves 26 UGA pre-service teachers and 33 mentor teachers at seven public schools in four school districts.
The goals of project PRIME are simple: develop collaborations among math teachers, school administrators, math teacher educators and mathematicians; collaborate with partner teachers in developing their roles as mentor teachers; and document and assess the impact of the partnerships.
The project’s initial focus was on field experiences, says Pat Wilson, associate professor of math education and PRIME’s principal investigator. An advisory board of teachers and university educators met in the summer of 1998 and designed the project around three principles.
First, three to four pre-service teachers are clustered in a school with three to four teachers. The groups offer more diverse experiences and viewpoints than the previous one-on-one model, says Wilson. Second, procedures for selecting and preparing mentors were created. The third principle modified the pre-service program to include pre-student-teaching experiences at the school where the candidates would student teach.
The program creates an extended relationship between mentors and preservice teachers and allows the cluster of students and teachers at each school to work together before eventually creating mentor-student pairs.
“This is really their whole program for the year,” says Wilson of the UGA teacher students. “In the fall, they take an ethics course and a field experience course. We use those two together--they’re very meshed. They’re two three-hour courses, but we block off from 12:30 to 3:30 every day. They may go out into the field during that time for a week and then come back to campus for a week. So we use the two classes together to do what we have to do.”
The UGA teacher students learn techniques, standards and principles in the classroom and then spend two weeks in an assigned public school observing and looking for evidence of what they’ve learned. They meet in their clusters with the mentor teachers at lunch, after school or in the evenings to discuss what they’ve seen. More discussions about the relationship between theory and practice take place when they return to the classroom.
What Wilson likes best about the cluster approach is that it gets the teachers involved. Although there may just be one student teacher assigned to a school, the program requires at least three mentors in that school in order to form a group and have meaningful discussions. This process has proved beneficial to the teachers as well as students.
“We actually have more mentors than we do undergraduates,” Wilson notes. “I think the teachers enjoy the program. They’re willing to do it even though they may not have a student teacher. The mentors say they learn from their own colleagues about teaching.”
And what are UGA student teachers learning?
“One thing that seems pretty universal is that it’s a lot more work they had realized,” says Wilson. “I think they knew it was going to be a lot of work, but when they get through with this they’re physically worn out, mentally exhausted. It’s a very demanding job.
“Another thing is that, typically, they’ve been good mathematics students and they haven’t been in classes where students are struggling with it,” she says. “But mathematics is a critical area, because it’s required for college, vocational school and even on-the-job training. Students need math, so we’ve got to have great mathematics teachers. And learning to work with a variety of students is a challenge.”
UGA graduate Kate Seger of Alpharetta, who began her first full-time position teaching ninth-grade math this fall in Gwinnett County, agrees.
“The most important lesson I learned was how to deal with classroom management and time management,” she says. “I liked how PRIME allowed us to work at the same high school with the same group of teachers throughout the entire year. This was very beneficial because we were able to spend more time learning teaching skills, rather than spending that time trying to re-adjust to a new school and new people.”
Would she consider being a mentor teacher?
“Definitely,” she says. “Mentor teachers have a lot to gain from participating in PRIME. They get to be exposed to the new styles, strategies and ideas of their student teachers, who have been recently filled with ideas and new methods by their college or university. I think a mentor teacher can be professionally refreshed by spending 15 weeks with an enthusiastic and willing student teacher.”
While the program has benefits for teacher students and mentor teachers, UGA doctoral students are at the same time studying the impact of mentoring itself. The U.S. Department of Education’s interest in that research is a large part of why the program received an Eisenhower grant, renewed for a third year this fall.
UGA researchers are trying to understand the differences between the knowledge learned in a university classroom and the knowledge learned as a student teacher in a high school.
The research on project PRIME has shown the delicate balance between addressing day-to-day teaching issues and reflecting on broader long-term issues. The urgency of classroom tasks encourages teachers to address the practical with their student teachers--practical questions are easier to discuss, easier to model and easier to recognize, says Wilson.
“We did find some teachers who addressed more than practical issues with their student teachers,” she says. “Some teachers created collegial relationships, discussing complex issues and helping student teachers to reflect on their own teaching. Although all mentor teachers wanted to share their expertise with the student teachers and create comfortable situations, teachers varied on how directive they were in their approach to mentoring.”
UGA researchers are also studying the nature of mathematical discussions between student teachers and mentor teachers and what mathematics is learned as part of the field experiences. |
