Cross-Course Mentoring via a Shared Communal Blog: Best Practices and Lessons Learned

Virtual Paper ID: 56581
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    Peggy Semingson
    The University of Texas at Arlington

Abstract: Grounded in the Community of Inquiry framework (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2001), this paper provides insights into ways to structure a digital mentoring experience for preservice (novice) teachers with graduate (more expert) practicing teachers within a shared blog space. Lessons learned and best practices from the instructor’s experience with doing this will be shared. The blog was set up to include weekly posts and opportunities to share about lesson design experiences with each other and with the master’s level literacy students. The instructor of this course taught both the preservice literacy methods course and the online graduate literacy course on the writing process at a large, public university in a large urban city in the American Southwest. The instructor implemented weekly blogging as an alternative to the traditional “reflective journals” that are typically not shared in digital forums. Specific guidelines to guide the experience included prompts and netiquette. Lessons learned include not overloading the novice teachers with too much structure, but to keep prompts open ended with the same structure for posting and response. Encourage knowledge sharing from more veteran educators and emphasize the goal of the blog as one of support and problem-solving towards fostering a broader community of inquiry.

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