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" Teachers teach as they were taught." —John Goodlad I am a faculty mentor at the University of Montana. I began mentoring my peers in the School of Education this academic year as a way to assist them in integrating the uses of technology into their curricula. This is important work and highly regarded by my dean and my department chair, who have agreed that I should devote 10 to 20 hours a week to the project. As we prepare students to teach in the 21st century, we need to ensure that they are equipped with the tools to meet the needs of children in the next millennium. Many of these tools will be technology tools. Therefore, it is essential that preservice teachers learn to teach with technology, and that they see their professors model the uses of technology. This article explores one approach to infusing technology into the preservice teacher-education curriculum: the assigning of mentors to education faculty members. Mentor ing projects at three universities will be described and recommendations will be given for similar projects. Dr. Don Robson, Dean of the School of Education at the University of Montana, equates the use of technology in education with the advent of the printing press. He believes it is central to the process of accessing, organizing, analyzing, and imparting information—his definition of teaching. "I see technology tools replacing textbooks and freeing teachers to access a wider variety of materials," Robson says. "The wise and deliberate use of technology also will enable teachers to become facilitators of learning instead of dispensers of knowledge." Because Robson sees technology as an essential tool in the classroom, he wants his faculty to model the use of technology in their classrooms. To accomplish this goal and to overcome some of the barriers to the use of educational technology, he has taken an aggressive approach to this subject. Robson worked with the technology committee to ensure that all faculty members had a current model computer on their desks. The School of Education has spent more than $100,000 on hardware and software during the last several years. This year, Robson also committed human resources to the effort. That's where I come in. Robson released me from one class per semester, so that I would have time to mentor my peers. In addition, he hired a student assistant to provide technical support 20 hours a week. In addition to helping faculty in the Elementary Methods Block learn to use and integrate technology into their courses, I also work with faculty from several different disciplines individually on a regular basis. Some faculty I assist on an as-needed basis. My "regular" protégées set goals at the beginning of the school year. All of them wanted to learn to use the Internet more effectively, both for information and interpersonal purposes. Most of them wanted to learn to use PowerPoint. During the spring 1997 semester, we have focused on HyperStudio. We always set another meeting time at the end of each session. In between sessions, faculty can call me and I help them with their current challenges. In addition to individual mentoring sessions, I have team taught with my protégées or been a guest lecturer in their classes. The mentoring approach has helped faculty see the benefits of technology, both as a productivity tool and as an instructional one. Dr. Marian McKenna, an Associate Professor of Literacy Studies, is one of my protégées. She recently told me that the mentoring approach has made technology more accessible for her. "Having a mentor has helped me overcome fears of technology," she says. "I'm not just sitting by myself with computer hardware and software. I'm learning from another person, which is important to me. This has helped me become more comfortable with technology and to view it as a useful tool." This protégé teaches a course to students in Helena, 100 miles away, uses PowerPoint to guide her class discussions, and e-mail to correspond with her students both individually and as a group. Her students have benefited too. The use of e-mail has made her much more accessible to them, and she uses PowerPoint to help prepare clear, well organized presentations. Most importantly, she notes, students now see her taking risks and learning new material. "I'm in the posture of being a learner," she says, "which is very healthy and provides a bond with my students beyond the rhetoric." Prior to coming to the University of Montana, I had been involved in a faculty mentoring project at a university in Florida. That experience helped me see the benefits that could be derived from assigning mentors to faculty members. In Florida, we developed the faculty mentoring project to assist the director of faculty technology development who was very busy mentoring faculty. The first year he was at the university, he worked with eight faculty members. The next year he worked with 40. He mentored the faculty individually and team taught some of their classes with them. Because faculty members were hungry to learn more about technology, we decided to use students in the Masters in Educational Technology program to mentor faculty members. The graduate students were enrolled in Educational Theory: Theory into Practice, a practicum course in which students facilitate the use of instructional media and information technologies. The graduate students enrolled in the course were paired with faculty who were interested in learning to use technology and integrating it into their classroom instruction. The graduate students and I met one night a week to discuss educational technology topics, change theories, and peer- coaching methods. As part of the course, students met with their faculty protégées at least two hours a week. The goal was for the mentors to teach faculty how to use technology, to feel comfortable with it, and to infuse technology into the preservice teacher curriculum. During the semester, most faculty protégées wanted to learn to use the statewide telecommunications network and a hypermedia program, HyperStudio. Half of the faculty participants were interested in presentation software. At the end of the semester, the faculty agreed that if they had not had a mentor, they would not have accomplished what they did during the semester. Two of the faculty protégées reported that their regularly scheduled meetings with their mentors were motivating—"similar to going to Weight Watchers or walking with a neighbor," as one faculty member said. In addition to providing motivation and training, the mentors also provided technical and moral support. The mentoring program at the university in Florida had been based on a similar program at Iowa State University. There, a graduate course entitled Technology in Teacher Education was offered for doctoral candidates in Curriculum and Instruction. The basic purpose of the course was to review the literature on the use of technology in teacher education and to provide professional practical experiences for the students. For the field component of the course, each of the 11 graduate students was assigned to help one or two faculty members integrate technology into their courses (Thompson & Schmidt, 1994). Faculty from a variety of disciplines volunteered to work with the graduate students. Each mentoring team worked in a collaborative manner, with faculty members indicating areas where they would like to use technology in teaching and students responding to these possibilities. In most cases, the pairing became a true collaboration, with the graduate student learning about the faculty member's course and curriculum and the faculty member learning more about technology applications and integration (Thompson and Schmidt, 1994). In all cases, graduate students were present to assist faculty members' first efforts to use technology in classrooms. Later in the semester, faculty members used technology without the graduate students' assistance. Mentoring is an excellent way to overcome the barriers to uses of educational technology in the classroom and to infuse technology into preservice teacher education. It provides faculty an opportunity to learn to use technology tools in a safe environment. The mentor can make faculty members aware of the appropriate technology tools for their teaching learning situation. Finally, the mentor can provide both technical and moral support as the faculty learn to use this tool which will be an integral part of the classroom in the 21st century. If you are planning to implement a mentoring program at your school, consider these recommendations.
Dr. Sally Brewer is an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at the University of Montana. She can be reached at sbrewer@selway.umt.edu or by calling (406) 243-2563. References Brewer, S.M. (1995). Infusing technology into the preservice teacher education curriculum: Four case studies in mentoring of university faculty by practitioner graduate students. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Central Florida, Orlando. Goodlad, J.I. (1990). Teachers for our nation's schools. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Thompson, A., & Schmidt, D. (1994). A three year plan to infuse technology throughout a teacher education program: Year 3 update. In B. Robin, D. Willis & J. Willis (Eds.), Technology and teacher education annual—1994 (pp. 358-360). Charlottesville, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education.
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