Research Projects

Titles	Faculty Technology Mentoring
Principal Investigator(s)	Dr. Ann Thompson
URL	http://www.public.iastate.edu/~mstar/mentor/home.html
Abstract	The program began in 1991 with the offering of the first graduate course, CI 610 (Technology in Teacher Education). The seminar course included readings and discussions on issues in technology in teacher education and a field component. For the field component, the students were asked to mentor a teacher education faculty member for 1 hour each week during the semester. In the seminar class, discussion centered on both current readings and the mentoring experiences of each of the students. The first semester of our mentoring experiment was successful, both from the perspective of the mentors and the mentees. Faculty participants were generous in their praise of the model and the graduate students made it clear that the mentoring was an extremely valuable experience for them. Although we have changed and adapted our model over the years, the basic structure remains much the same. In ten years, we have had more than 100 graduate students work as mentors and more than 50 faculty members participate as mentees. Many of our graduate students have gone on to establish similar programs at colleges and universities around the country.