Jeannette Sather

Internship Project
School year 2016-2017

Project 5.30 Other:

Peer Mentoring from the Local Middle School

Part 1: I met with my mentor to discuss the idea of having 8th grade
students from the middle school across the street come over once a
week to mentor the 3rd grade students. Oct 18, 2016

Part 2: Early on in the school year, 3rd grade teachers were reporting
many concerns regarding behavior in their classrooms. At the time we
had three 3rd grade classrooms with about 12 students in each room.
Students would bicker with each other, and be verbally aggressive with
their classmates. As teachers tried to establish routines and
procedures to begin the year, they found themselves losing a lot of
instructional time dealing with peer conflicts.

By early October, the school district reallocated one 3rd grade teacher
position to another building due to low student numbers in our
building. With this reallocation, the three classrooms were combined
to make two.

Shortly after this, I ran into an advisory teacher from Franklin Middle
School (the school across the street), and we discussed the student
behavior concerns we saw in each building. This advisory teacher has
been extremely successful with building relationships throughout his
teaching career, and we started talking about teaming up his older
students with my younger students for mentoring.

On November 9, Mr. B started with his middle school students as

mentors to our third-graders. The plan was to meet once a week, and
build relationships between students. Our goal was to see a decrease
in peer conflict in each of the third grade classes. This data was to be
collected through anecdotal observation from classroom teachers. Mr.
B was going to work with the teachers to set up a socio-emotional
break corner for each classroom. As of March 28 he had yet to follow
through.

In mid-February, Mr. B met with me and we reviewed his goals of the

mentor project. He admitted that he had been doing most of the work
and leading each of the weekly sessions. He planned to turn more of
the leadership over to the students. He also proposed a grant he had
written for a musical recording project. With this project the mentors
would work with the 3rd graders to write a school song that focused on
literacy being cool. He asked me to approved it and send it to the
district office. I requested that if the grant was approved the students
write the song as part of a writing unit. I also asked that our IB
coordinator be consulted so the IB Learner Profiles and Attributes were
a focus of the project. As of, March 31, we have not heard whether the
grant was approved.
Part 3: I met with each of the 3rd grade teachers, separately, on March
28. They all had very similar opinions about the effectiveness of the
mentor program. They were disappointed that Mr. B had not followed
through on the concrete data work he had promised, and they had no
measureable data to support the mentor program. They also felt that,
although it was nice to start building the bridge to middle school, it
should have been the middle school students leading the work and not
Mr. B. The teachers said that their 3rd graders have built relationships
with Mr. B, but not so much with the middle school students, and that it
is not uncommon for some of the middle school students to just sit
silently in the back of the room while Mr. B does the talking. Since my
meeting with Mr. B in February, the 3rd teachers have not seen an
increase in student-led work.

Teachers also thought it would be great if the mentors would talk about
struggles they have faced, either in school or their personal lives
(whatever they would be comfortable sharing) and talk about how they
persisted and were able to remain positive. They would have also liked
students working on some sort of collaborative project, again feeling
that Mr. B did all the work, not the mentors.

All three teachers said if the mentorship remained the same, they
would not do it again next year. Instead they would prefer to take back
the 20-30 minutes of instructional time for academics.

Part 4 and 5: I met with my mentor on Friday, March 31 to review the

project. Overall, I did all of the reflecting during this meeting, and he
listened and nodded in agreement.

It was clear to me that Mr. B is a great mentor for middle school

students, but may not have the skills to teach students how to mentor
other students. If I were to support this project again next year, which
I would like to do, I would need to work more closely with Mr. B to plan
out the work, including the specific data collection. Although I asked
several times for updates on the data, Mr. B and the teachers were not
able to provide any. I should have stepped in and planned this part.
The 3rd grade teachers, have said they should have taken responsibility
and come to me sooner, or talked with Mr. B about their
disappointment in the program. I believe that Mr. B needs to prepare
his middle school students to be mentors, and build their leadership
skills. He met with my teachers once a week, so he could use the
advisory time with his own students to plan their work, and prepare
them to be mentors.

I would also work more closely with Mr. B to set goals for his own
students. Perhaps his students had no desire to mentor younger kids.
Im now curious to know if this is a discussion he ever had with his
students.

In working with Mr. B, I made the same mistakes with him, that he
made with his students. I assumed Mr. B would just know how to help
his students become mentors. He and I should have been more
strategic in our work, so it would transfer to the work he did with his
students.