Examine the significance of the practice enhancement role of the mentor on the facilitation of learning in your current place of employment.
Mentoring has been described as a process that helps an individual adapt to new and expanded professional roles. Mentoring involves a nurturing relationship between a mentor and a mentee. Mentoring occurs when a senior person (the mentor) provides information, advice, and emotional support for a junior person (the mentee) in a relationship lasting over an extended period of time and marked by substantial emotional commitment by both parties. The mentor takes an active role in the professional development of the mentee. “Inherent in the concept of mentoring is a personal, one-to-one, nurturing relationship between the mentor and the mentee” (2001).
The nursing literature shows the consensus seen in other disciplines regarding the concept and value of mentoring. The focus for mentoring in nursing has shifted over the past 3 decades, paralleling the emerging concerns of the profession; current emphasis is on mentoring in research. This growing national and international need generates concern about the necessary resources to effectively mentor researchers (2002).
As a nurse, I am a primary member of the health care team responsible for ensuring that all the educational needs of clients as well as other health care workers are met. However, there are some cases where the needs are highly complex. Thus, the choice of instructional methods depends on the learning needs, the time available for teaching, the setting, the resources available, and the nurse’s own comfort level with teaching (2004). As I already know the skill of suture removal, I am comfortable that I can teach them this.
Teaching during routine care is actually efficient and cost-effective. Teaching is done more effectively whole delivering the skill. This becomes easier as confidence increases in one’s own clinical skills. For example, while actually performing suture removal on a patient, I can provide explanation on what is being done. But the catch of this is that the patient may not appreciate being made an example to a group of health care support workers for their education and learning.
Supporting Learners in Practice
The demise of behaviorism and the emergence of constructivism in people’s view of human nature are not the only sources of our changing conception of children and education. We have come to realize that meaning matters and that it is not something that can be imparted from teacher to student (1999).
Behaviorism waned, and criterion-referenced testing became less popular as an instructional management strategy. Today, there is less emphasis on the teaching and testing of isolated component skills and greater recognition that skills learned in one context may be inaccessible in another. Even if adults can readily see how the morning’s drill and practice should support the afternoon’s reading or problem solving, young learners have an amazing capacity for not making such connections (1999).
In a sense, all teachers can do is to “make noises in the environment.” By this it is meant that we have in education no main line into the brains of our students. We are shapers of the environment, stimulators, motivators, guides, consultants, resources. But in the end, what children make of what we provide is a function of what they construe from what we offer. Meanings are not given, they are made. And we are interested in enabling students to make their activities in school meaningful, not merely because of the grades they receive but, more important, because of the satisfactions and insights their efforts make possible
We have also come to realize that the kinds of meanings that our students can make are related to the forms of representation they can employ themselves or can decode when others have used them. Each of the forms of representation that exist in our culture visual forms in art, auditory forms in music, quantitative forms in mathematics, propositional forms in science, choreographic forms in dance, poetic forms in language are vehicles through which meaning is conceptualized and expressed (1999). A life that is driven by the pursuit of meaning is enriched when the meanings sought and secured are multiple, as could be gauged from this side of the argument.
Assessing Learners in Practice
Educators came to believe that, in order to strengthen all students’ educational experiences and to better meet all students’ needs, assessments that concurrently allow for an understanding of students’ learning processes and knowledge base and that support variations in pedagogy are required.
In addition, advocates of performance assessments suggest that the use of performance assessments will have salutary effects on student motivation and learning; because performance assessments stress interdisciplinary skills and use contextualized assignments (i.e., assignments that mimic the kinds of multifaceted problems one encounters outside the classroom), students are more likely to be involved in attempting and completing these assessments (1996).
Assessment can be viewed from different contexts. Test-based assessments are used to determine students’ preparedness for admission to specific educational programs. Assessments based on improvements benefit both teachers and students by identifying students’ abilities for intellectual growth, and determining the need to enhance teaching techniques. Schools rely on assessment to have a clear perspective of teachers’ efficacy and students’ progress ( 1997).
In the book, the two issues raised are from the viewpoints of , associate director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, argues that performance assessment is consistent with the emphasis on standards and accountability of the high-stakes testing reform movement but avoids many of the pitfalls of traditional approaches to testing. On the contrary, a professor in the School of Education at Stanford University, argues against the philosophy of “high-stakes testing and accountability” and contends that performance assessment does not make this philosophy any more palatable or successful than does the use of traditional standardized tests.
In the Singaporean education, performance assessment has been used for a meaningful education reform. The use of performance assessment is not an entirely new strategy in Singaporean education. Essays, oral presentations, and other kinds of projects always have been features of elite private education. In many classrooms–both private and public–teachers for years have been assessing student progress through assigned papers, reports, and projects that are used as a basis for course grades.
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment