RESEARCH General Education

TEACHER SUPPORT
E-mentoring program expanding for teachers in Illinois

Craig Chamberlain, News Editor
(217) 333-2894; cdchambe@uiuc.edu

7/1/03

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — An innovative program for online group mentoring of new teachers, one of a handful in the United States, is branching out from East Central Illinois to other parts of the state.

The 3-year-old "e-mentoring" program, developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is starting soon at Loyola University in Chicago. Discussions also are under way with five other universities, as well as with other potential sites, for start-up later in the school year.

"We think it has tremendous potential … particularly for continuing the influence of a teacher education program (with recent graduates)," says Renee Clift, a professor of education at Illinois. Clift is a coordinator of the Novice Teacher Support Project (NTSP) based at Illinois. The e-mentoring program is a part of the project.

NTSP has worked with more than 500 first-, second- and third-year teachers in three Illinois counties (Champaign, Ford and Vermilion) during the last six years. The support project grew out of a partnership that involves the university, two of the state’s regional offices of education, and the school districts in the three counties, along with support from teachers’ unions.

The funding that allows NTSP to expand e-mentoring comes from a one-year, $250,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education, obtained by the Illinois State Board of Education.
The time is right for taking the e-mentoring model on the road, say its developers, because they’ve learned most of the hard lessons about what works and what doesn’t.
"I think when people conceptualize e-mentoring, they think ‘I need a Web site, I need participants, and I’m on – that’s it,’ " says Cari Klecka, the coordinator and principal developer of the online program. But the "If you build it, they will come" concept just doesn’t work, she said.

In fact, the first year of e-mentoring at NTSP was a flop, Clift and Klecka both concede, except for everything they learned as a result. "We didn’t come in with an idea of what it should look like – we let the participants tell us what it should look like," Klecka said.

In the first year, they found that veteran teachers serving as e-mentors often waited for new teachers to post questions or concerns, but most new teachers were reticent to do so. As a result, little online discussion occurred. They also found that face-to-face meetings between the two groups encouraged everyone to use the program. With these and other changes, online traffic increased 10-fold the second year.

One surprise, Klecka said, is that many e-mentors say they’ve learned as much as the new teachers as a result of the multiple perspectives they can find online from teachers at other schools. They also say they’ve discovered a professional community online, where their ideas are respected, and where the distinction between mentor and new teacher often and eventually gets overlooked.