Education Week - August 28, 2013 - 8

8 EDUCATION WEEK AUGUST 28, 2013 www.edweek.org
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For Rural Teachers,
Mentoring Support
Is Just a Click Away
By Stephen Sawchuk
Though located hundreds of
miles apart, only one thing separated
Kansas teacher Linda
Dixon from the six novice special
educators she advised last year:
bandwidth.
Day and night, the veteran
teacher offered personalized advice
and support to her junior
colleagues in all corners of the
Sunflower State, as well as stimulate
discussions among them and
point the group toward resources
through the online platform that
kept them all connected.
“The whole purpose is to try
to get them engaged,” Ms. Dixon
said. “It’s like our own little family,
our own little community.”
Online mentoring—or E-Mentoring
for Student Success, as
it’s called by the Santa Cruz,
Calif.-based New Teacher Center,
which facilitates the Kansas
initiative—is beginning to catch
on as states seek ways to support
new teachers that aren’t limited
by geography or time. Those two
factors have been particularly
challenging for teachers in rural
locales, where the nearest physics,
calculus, or special education
teacher might be in a school or
district hours away.
“We are not a unique state, in
that we have a large land mass
and that we have districts that
are small with great distances between
them,” said Colleen Riley,
the director of early childhood,
special education, and title services
for federal programs at the
Kansas education department.
Program History
Kansas’ program began last
year, but the roots of the E-Mentoring
for Student Success initiative
go back a decade.
The New Teacher Center, the
National Science Teachers Association,
and the Science Math Resource
Center at Montana State
University, in 2002, with support
from the National Science Foundation,
came together to create
an online platform for math and
science teachers.
The goal: to learn how technology
could support teachers during
the tumultuous first years in the
classroom.
Gaining a classroom footing can
be particularly tough for teachers
of specialized content areas when
they are isolated by geography
or stretched by local needs. That
was the case with the last cohort
advised by Catherine Stierman, a
mentor in the life sciences.
“Most of them were in small
schools or had more than three
courses to prep,” said Ms. Stierman,
an instructor at Clarke University
in Dubuque, Iowa, who is
now writing her doctoral dissertation
on the program. “If you’re
one of only a couple of science
teachers, it’s hard to get the help
you need. You know the other person
is really bogged down, too.”
The New Teacher Center
matches each teacher with an experienced
peer in his or her field,
selected through a competitive
application process. (About five
people apply for each mentoring
spot.) It trains the mentors on
how to build trust with the novices
and how to probe in the online
discussion among their cohort
members.
Mentors are compensated up
to $3,000 annually depending on
how many teachers they support.
Each mentor is expected to interact
with the members of his or
her group at least twice a week,
through private messaging or a
conversation by phone or Skype.
The mentor also poses questions
for the group each week for reflection,
leads weekly online conversations,
or leads an “exploration”
of a particular instructional problem
over several weeks. The Web
portal that helps the new teachers
connect also gives them access
to other content experts and
training opportunities.
Over the decade, the program
has grown and evolved. The science
teachers’ group continues to
use it as part of its New Science
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pate in the center’s e-mentoring
program. Sources of funding differ:
Districts and states usually
pick up the tab, but even some
businesses, such as Boeing, have
chipped in to support educators in
their communities.
A Special Need
We couldn’t
get matches in
our rural areas
because there
weren’t enough
experienced
teachers to go
out and serve
as mentors.”
JULIE WILSON
Greenbush Education Service Center
Girard, Kan.
Teacher Academy, which supports
teachers in their second to fifth
years in the classroom.
The New Teacher Center has
expanded the e-mentoring program
to other content areas such
as math. And in 2010, with help
from the U.S. Department of Education’s
office of special education
programs and several state education
departments, it tailored
the program for special educators.
They are matched with mentors
who specialize in exceptionalities,
such as behavior or autism spectrum
disorders.
In all, some 1,500 teachers
across all 50 states now partici-
Kansas’ involvement was born
out of a specific desire to curb
“churn” among special educators.
The state requires mentoring for
new teachers, but the vagaries of
local control and budgeting mean
that district implementation varies
from the well-thought-out to
the haphazard.
State data show that, in recent
years, more than 800 special educators
in Kansas have turned
over annually, according to Julie
Wilson, the coordinator of statewide
recruitment and retention
for the Greenbush Education Service
Center, in Girard.
And a significant number of
special education hires have held
nonstandard qualifications. About
14 percent of special educators in
2011-12 did not hold qualified
licenses, far higher than the 2
percent in math and 4 percent in
science, Ms. Wilson said.
Improving beginning support
for such teachers seemed an attractive
solution, but it posed logistical
obstacles.
“We knew if we tried to do faceto-face
mentoring, it would be
challenging,” Ms. Wilson said.
“We couldn’t get matches in our
rural areas because there weren’t
enough experienced teachers to
go out and serve as mentors. And
it would be shooting ourselves in
the foot because we’d be taking an
experienced educator out of their
position.”
The solution was to help practicing
classroom teachers like Ms.
Dixon spread their expertise further
through e-mentoring.
Kindra Rowley, in rural Lyons,
Kan., was one of six teachers Ms.
Dixon mentored last year. With
only limited exposure during her
teacher-preparation program
to individualized education programs,
or IEPs, Ms. Rowley sought
extra help navigating the complex
documents, which set out
goals and supports for each special
education student.
She usually was able to receive
help in less than 24 hours, either
from Ms. Dixon, who checks her
messages several times a day, or
from other special educators in
her cohort.
Ms. Rowley believes e-mentor-
ing has a distinct advantage over
more traditional types: the ability
to seek instructional guidance
without the discomfort of inquiring
from a supervisor.
“I save my questions for Linda,”
she said.
Ms. Stierman, the Iowa-based
life-sciences mentor, believes the
layer of anonymity can help novices
build resilience.
“You see that there are other
people out there that are having
the same struggles, and it’s OK to
ask for help,” she said. “It’s a confidence
builder for them.”
Designs Evolving
Research linking the effects of
online professional development
to student learning remains
relatively thin, but a few newer
studies support the notion that
teacher coaching done remotely
can be effective at changing prac-
AK
Linda Dixon, a
teacher at MacArthur
Elementary School in
Fort Leavenworth,
Kan., mentors
less-experienced
teachers via the
Internet. “It’s like
our own little family,
our own little
community,”
she says.
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