PULLMAN, Wash. – A Washington State University project that provides virtual tutoring for primary and secondary students across the state may one day serve as a model for helping to improve the quality of undergraduate programs for classroom teachers everywhere.
Professional educators have long recognized that most educational programs for would-be teachers are constrained by the inability to allow students to practice teaching skills in an actual classroom setting until the latter stages of their education – creating an over-reliance on coursework that some researchers describe as “learning about teaching, without learning how to teach.”
But while colleges and universities recognize the value of offering preservice teachers early field experience in tutoring and mentoring, many postsecondary institutions – especially the substantial number which are geographically isolated – also face significant geographic, resource and other limitations to providing such “real world” opportunities to practice their teaching skills.
Gerald Maring, a professor with the WSU College of Education’s Department of Teaching and Learning, said developing the means to provide pre-service teachers with meaningful instructional experience earlier in their education is a major focus of the university’s Cyber Mentoring Project, which is considered a leading-edge educational research project nationally.
An outgrowth of an educational research effort originated at WSU in 1996, the project uses high-end videoconferencing links between college-level tutors and K-12 students statewide through partnerships with school districts that range from Colville to
Spearheaded by Maring and developed in collaboration with a number of WSU faculty members, the project began providing educational interactions between public school students and college student tutors using customized Web sites and e-mail communications.
But with the gradual acquisition of videoconferencing hardware and software by both WSU and five partner school districts across the state, the university’s research began augmenting its keyboard-based educational efforts with virtual mentoring in 1999. At that time, the university acquired a five-year, $9.6 million grant from the Department of Education to support the program. The in 2003, the project received encouraging transitional funding ($100,000 from the National Science Foundation) to explore and plan how cybermentoring might serve as a tool for career mentoring and math skills development among
Now employing PC writing tablets and high-definition cameras to bring into focus both instructional materials at desktop-level and the nuanced facial expressions of WSU’s preservice cyber teachers and their students, the technological transition within the project has allowed researchers to create a live virtual social learning environment that captures most of the inherent teaching and learning advantages of more traditional one-on-one and small-group tutoring sessions.
One recently concluded cybermentoring project, funded by both the CO-TEACH grant and Bridges for Engineering Education grant from the National Science Foundation, involved both education and engineering faculty from WSU. Working with two research assistants and nine preservice teachers, the WSU faculty members collaborated with a classroom math teacher and her alternative high school students, an inner city math/special education teacher and her eighth grade students, and a rural junior high teacher and her eighth grade students. Using specially adapted curriculum and assessment materials, the project centered on a bridge-building simulation that included a number of exercises intended to teach fractions, perimeters, ratios and some basic geometry. The simulation was planned with the assistance of a consulting professor from WSU’s College of Engineering and Architecture
Students were instructed to build a bridge spanning two moveable tables using plastic drinking straws, straight pins, and masking tape in a competition to determine which bridge would be capable of supporting the greatest weight suspended by a string from the middle of the bridge. During the tutoring sessions the teams often used trial-and-error methods while following a set of written directions and filling in a mathematics worksheet.
Terri Pixlee, a teacher who works with 9-12 grade students in an alternative program at
A classroom teacher for more than 20 years, Pixlee said her experience led her to view cybermentoring as a technological approach to education with many parallels in classroom instruction.
“When you talk about virtual education, most people think of computer-based programs that involve little more than language on a Web page,” Pixlee said. “Cybermentoring is face-to-face, eye-to-eye instruction. Our students loved it.”
She said she also sees the WSU technology as a potentially “invaluable” tool in providing pre-service teachers with first-hand experience in many key aspects of classroom teaching.
“I’ve seen how we lose many first-year classrooms teachers, in large part because they don’t have a chance to see what classrooms are really like and lack many needed classroom management skills,” she said. “Cybermentoring alone won’t prepare pre-service teachers for the classroom, but it can give them a real taste of what it’s like.”
One measure of the success of the cyber mentoring effort at WSU is that the program was chosen by the National University Telecommunications Network to receive its Outstanding Distance Education Innovation Award in 2003.
In addition to offering a unique educational venue that provides feedback to all participants in real time, the project generates research data in the form of pre-service and practicing teacher plans and notes, student work, audio conversations, and high-end video interactions that offer valuable insights into the educational process, Maring said.
As word of the Cybermentoring Project’s successes in helping to foster improvements in the academic performance of participating K-12 students has spread within the state’s educational community, Maring said WSU has seen an ever-increasing interest in extending the service beyond the five public school districts currently participating in the project to other districts throughout the state.
It’s an interest made feasible by the fact that the state of
K-20 students across the state. Designed and implemented by the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, WHETS now interconnects the state’s colleges and universities with all 296 school districts within the state.
In addition to having access to an educational network infrastructure that is one of the most advanced in the United States, the WSU Cybermentoring project has benefited from corporate advisory partnerships with companies like Microsoft and Polycom, which Maring said have been “generous and encouraging” in bringing a variety of technological assistance and support to the development of WSU’s current research effort.
Maring and his colleagues view an expansion of the project to other areas of the state as one of the ultimate outcomes of their work, but he cautioned that the WSU project is still in the research and development stages.
“We’re still involved in the ‘proof of concept’ phase of our work, and a key focus of our research is on the educational benefits the project provides preservice teachers,” he said. “This type of research needs to be performed within a fairly narrow focus. In subsequence phases, we will expect to conduct more wide-ranging research on an expanded regional basis and perhaps even national scale.”
In 2004, only schools in
Maring said a primary focus of the research effort for the past year has been on the analysis of data and the publication of studies derived from data obtained through the experiences of WSU’s preservice teachers in mentoring students in school districts during the past three years.
