Mentoring/2nd meeting

The second meeting of mentoring took place on the 16th of January. This time the group have spend the same amount of time on planning the meeting, but there were some changes in our actions:

• The meeting of mentors was online (the group was using Skype for discussions, Google Drive for collaboration and Prezi for making the presentations);

• Less time was spent on arranging the activities, so that more time was spent on the pedagogical content of the lesson, checking how methods and activities promote our preset goals;

• Goals were modified to fulfill mentees’ needs and preferences;

• The group members have made a big step forward in creating new ideas and understanding each other.

In the very beginning it was decided that there will be one mentor responsible for the one section of mentoring process, so we had to divide topics and everyone got the opportunity to embody his pedagogical and technological ideas. The topic of the second meeting was “Project work” and I was the person responsible for planning and implementing it. First I gathered all my ideas and suggested them to other mentors, after getting feedback the plan was renovated.

The first idea was to introduce the mentees with the project working area in Finland, but as we do not possess such skills, we decided to focus our pedagogy on our own practice in educational projects, not forgetting to provide the theoretical material from the reliable sources.

In order to better illustrate how the goals  were accomplished I will describe the implementation of the meeting itself.

1. The topic, goals and outcomes were presented to students.

Topic: “Working area/projects

Goals:

• introduce students with the educational projects

• train students how to lead projects and apply current knowledge and skills into practice

Outcomes:

Students will learn more about the project area and will be able to apply existing knowledge and skills in practice and be prepared for the real projects.

2.In order to activate students’ thinking on the current topic and to know more about their working experience, the fllowing questions were given to students:

Where did you work? Did you have some experience in a project work?

How did you manage to overcome difficulties and perform your duties?

What skills were required to succeed in your work?

How did you apply your knowledge in practice?

One of the mentees possesses a vast experience in the project area, while another one has not any experience in this field at all that is why the discussion was useful for both mentors and mentees to fulfill their knowledge.

3. The next step was to get students interested in the practical part of the LET Programme. We started with the short introduction that included our feelings and impressions on the practical courses and after that shared our project-working experience.

Both courses were presented to students:

• TEL course

Mentors shortly described the ideas and results (pedagogy and technology), some difficulties and impressions on the course.

• Educational projects

Mentors shown the presentations of their projects shifting from the problem and content of project to its solution, not forgetting about the emotions. The result products were also introduced to mentees: posters and videos.

4. After sharing our experience we provided some scaffold on how to lead project by means of sharing the videos on project management to students:

5. The last step was summarizing and conclusions. The chain of steps was given to students, mentors and mentees had to discuss and fulfill the following points:

• Keeping in touch with the client

• Working collaboratively

• Providing solutions

• Result performance

From the conclusions part it was seen that mentors managed to reach the expected results and accomplish their goals. I really hope the mentees have the same opinion.

From my side, that was an interesting experience to be as both the mentor and listener at the same time as I had to participate online during the meeting. When you seat in the classroom you become the part of the whole process and you cannot notice some important issues. But when you have the opportunity to watch the processes from outside, you can make good conclusions about mistakes and ways of improvement.

Here are some points for our group that on my opinion should be taken into account:

1. In spite of the fact that mentors were showing more useful pieces of advice and sharing their practical experience, presentation and argumentation of ideas make an impression that mentors are still not completely confident in their actions and ideas. As we have a good and proved plan of the meetings, we have discussed all the ideas and got the shared understanding of the learning materials and moreover this is our chance to experience ourselves as mentors which role is quite similar to the teacher we need to keep confident and get used to the mentor position. We should give a good example to the mentees.

2. The next point is acting according to the plan. Every educator knows the situation that in spite of the fact that you have had a certain plan of learning activities and methods to use, when you come to the classroom there are so many different factors that make the teacher change his plan and improvise on educational purposes but goals stay the same and the teacher should always try to proceed according to the plan, preset goals and expected outcomes. Our mentoring group has managed to cope with a lot of circumstances and change plan a bit, but that is important to remember that each activity has had its own purpose to comply with.

3. The same problem is time management. I truly believe that we should work more on the plan first and do not make big changes in the sequence of learning activities and the time spent on them during the meeting with mentees.

4. Mentor-mentee collaboration. We also need to work out our plans and activities in detail so that we can achieve mentor-mentee collaboration on the higher level. For example if the purpose of the activity was to make mentors and mentees elaborate the solutions together there should not be such a situation that only mentors suggest their ideas. To achieve better collaboration on my opinion we need to think not only the goal of the activity but discuss the better ways of its implementation and choose strategies to use; act according to the plan not forgetting about taking into account the inеrnal and external factors; show a good example of collaboration to students and promote their thinking and argumentation by means of asking questions and suggesting the ideas.

5. I like the way we collaborate and the timetable of meetings for mentors seem reasonable and satisfied. However I would like to come up with the idea that mentors need to have some extra time spent on discussing the impression on the conducted meeting with mentees: to share the impressions and thoughts, identify the pros and cons, what have been managed and what should be taken into account the next time. We need to get positive and critical feedback not only from mentees but from the mentors also. Reading each others blogpost reflections would be useful to benefit from the mentoring!

The presentation can be found here http://prezi.com/5i6jhdxfd8wc/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy