Fall Term Mentor Portfolio Essay

Fall Term Mentor Portfolio Essay

Teaching in my mentor sessions this term has thankfully gotten much better after a rocky start. I learned a lot in the spring and fall training sessions, but I feel like nothing really prepares you to actually do the teaching. In the training, we received a lot of instruction in how to structure the sessions and what to work on, but I wish we had spent more time actually practicing teaching. The training sessions demanded that we become less nervous around new people through icebreakers, but we were never really required to put a lesson plan together and execute it. That was the hardest part for me in the first week. I had come away from the training without a full knowledge of what level of planning that I needed to make the mentor sessions work. On the first day, I had made a rough sketch of an agenda for myself including some introductory icebreakers, discussion of the syllabus, and examples of some online resources. Unfortunately, my rough agenda did not include a back up plan for the online resources lesson, ie logging into the Blackboard website and other important campus websites. When I got to the first session the campus server had gone down, shooting a big hole in my plan that I was not really practiced enough to fill in with other discussion. So on the first day, I was so nervous and flustered that I had to let them go early. All of the sessions afterward, I wrote a lesson plan for that has always included several back-up plans. I wish that the training had given me an opportunity to practice a session before doing it for students.
That is not to say that I felt unprepared to be a mentor. Several of the workshops provided me with valuable tools to make sessions both fun and productive. First of all, I was surprised at how much help icebreakers were in getting students involved. For instance, my sessions played naming icebreaker games in both of the first two sessions that helped me learn their names faster than I thought was possible. Knowing student names was amazingly helpful in facilitating discussion, because I could call on individuals. Also, it laid a groundwork of respect with the students that was a big help. The writing center training was also a big help during my first term of mentoring. First of all, the website was a big help in organizing my writing lessons. I used the ten steps section as a reference for my students by showing them the actual site, and some of the techniques that the site explains. I found the reverse outlining and peer review process explanations especially helpful in the sessions right before my students had papers due in the main session. I also used some of the same instructions for free-writing that the writing center director explained to us in one of the writing training sessions. Most of all, I used the method of global revision as a way to explain to students how to tell if their essays make sense. Many of my students were caught up on grammatical problems, but had no real sense of whether their essay’s argument made sense, so global revision the was the most useful method. By far, the writing center training was the training that I used the most in my sessions.