Get Your Students Hired
Research now shows that student who "connect" with at least one student one faculty member and one administrator persist the most.
In the feild I teach the students usually
take their education personally and will
usually seek out instructors as mentors for
themselves but most instructors will find students that they feel need more for some reason
usually I suspect they see something of themselves in the students they seek out. Our
individual courses are comparitively short so
throughout the school with close to 16 instructors a year most students find at least
one instructor they continue to seek out and
every instructor has students that stop
by on occaision for additional help. I
believe this is the part most of our instructors
find to be the most satisfying.
Mentoring is crucial. So simple, and yet difficult to achieve if there are more than 100 students....the personal touch is important, no doubt about that! But how can we achieve this? It seems that a teacher can effectively mentor 10-20 students. (Though this could depend on the school or subjects.)
This is such an important facet of what we do. Many of our students do not have this in their lives at all, in fact have been told by family that they will not succeed. The challenge comes in balancing this with modeling and monitoring. the monitoring is a challenge for many of our instructors.
This is a very accurate observation. In addition, by mentoring students, we also learn more about the individual student and can then give more detailed direction to help the student succeed.
Many of our students don't have mentors in their lives. Instructors fill that role. Along with mentoring, we must also model and monitor(hold them accountable and follow up). Do most of the instructors at your school do this?
Joe