Project:  Mentoring Equals Success

Team Members:
Rose Wolvek: Foreign Language Adjunct Instructor at SUNY Orange and Mt. St. Mary College
Myriam Velez-Pettit: Special Education Teacher at Middletown High School
Maria Blon: Math, College Success and Yoga Teacher at SUNY Orange

Project:
Our project centers on the concept of Mentoring=Success.  We created a survey that was administered (with the help of Maria Blon) to her education students and Future Teachers of America group.  We are currently tabulating the data gleaned from the survey and will present all the stats and information to the group on June 1.

In addition, we had a teleconference with Jeremy Hilinski, a 26-year old educator in his 4th year of teaching (a graduate of Teach for America) and the Future Teachers group.  It was extremely informative, with the students asking many questions (particularly about mentoring).  Jeremy could not have been more open about his experience as a young educator.

The only obstacle that we’ve encountered so far was an uncooperative land line for the teleconference.

Results:
Our initial project promoted success from College to the Workforce, which is one step above the High School to College transition that was the primary focus of this partnership.  All is not lost because we created a model project that can be used to transition students from one level of schooling to the next.  Following is a summary of what we have done and ideas for mentoring projects in the future.

The spark for this project was Rose Wolvek who mentored her high school student Jeremy as he transitioned to college.  Rose continued to mentor Jeremy as he braved teaching at an inner-city school in Los Angeles, up through his present adventures into the school administration field.  Rose serves as a model for long term mentoring from high school, through college and beyond.

We arranged to have a teleconference between future teachers at SUNY Orange and Jeremy.  The college students were inspired to hear Jeremy’s experiences from a person so close to their age.  We administered a survey to the students who participated in this teleconference.  Next time we host a mentoring teleconference, we will administer the survey before and after to monitor the learning that took place.  The summary of Jeremy’s words of wisdom was passed out to future teachers at SUNY Orange who could not attend the teleconference.

The next mentoring project planned will be easier to set-up since future teachers at SUNY Orange would like to mentor high school students who are interested in teaching, transition to college.  We hope to invite a representative from each of the local high schools to attend a mentoring session with SUNY Orange future teachers.  We have the advantage of meeting personally with the student representatives.  Since there will be a limited number of students at the mentoring event, we will again summarize what was discussed and have the high school students bring handouts back to their classmates in the high school to spread the word.  The representatives will be the liaison and will learn from this leadership role.  To be honest, we do not have all of the details worked out on this next project, but there is time since the best time for this mentoring would be in the Spring as high school seniors start thinking about transitioning to college.  We will need to coach our future teachers so that they are as engaging and informative as Jeremy.