Resources for Current Mentors
Getting Started:
In general, each MAPS meeting should include a mentoring component, a challenge component, and a chance for the mentor to tutor students and answer any questions the student may have about their subject matter. What follows are mentor-student meeting ideas for each of these three categories.
Mentoring: Starting the meeting off on the right foot
Open each meeting with an activity to get the group speaking.
- Ice breakers give structured platform for getting to know one another.
- Brain puzzles engage student's scientific curiosity.
Challenging:
Try mathematical modeling of real world problems to show how math and science apply to solving industry issues:
- Look for significant problems that students can solve. We hope for students to grapple with nebulous questions, and want them to find ways of working with assumptions and approximations. Ambiguous problems are great.
- Walk students through initial steps of turning a physical situation into a mathematical model; discuss identifying key variables
- Describe what the developed model accomplishes.
- At a low math level, get students to solve equations at a few points in the modeling process.
- More fully describe the model, and how math addresses it. This can be a challenging exposure for students to math methods.
- Go slowly, and at each step ask students to describe what is being done.
Hands-on learning:
- Dissemble a machine to investigate inner workings and driving principles.
- Build a project addressing a chosen task.
- Test a scientific principle, or the science driving some modern innovation
Mentoring: Making real-world and work connections
- Use the challenge activity to segue into topics addressed in the work-place.
- Take examples from one’s own work, or other jobs that one knows of.
- Link ideas to a physical place by taking students on a jobsite tour.
- Consider bringing in friends or coworkers who have jobs addressing topics that come up during applied activities.
- Ask if students have questions on academic areas or courses of study in general, probe their interests and thoughts on education after high school.
Make sure to take some time in the beginning of the year to get to know the students. If students seem low-energy, try playing some games to energize, take a break and de-stress.
Tutoring: Reinforcing classroom work
- Seek the teacher’s thoughts on this, and find what help they would like.
- Through the meeting’s progression, there should be opportunities to reinforce topics covered in the classroom.
- It may work well to address homework, or AP®, questions as they arise in conjuncture with topics discussed. Or, as students think to ask them.
- It also can work to give a portion of time purely to questions, finding homework topics or AP® subjects that student’s would like help with.
Mentoring: Wrapping up the meeting
Always take the last two minutes of a mentoring session to reflect on what you did and discuss future plans.
For more information:
Address: P.O. Box 2338, Vancouver, WA 98668
Email: info@apmentoring.org
Phone: (360) 718-1603
