August 2004 — Exclusive
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Database-Facilitated Mentoring Drives the Effective Placement of Student Teachers
On behalf of Practicum and School Partnership Committee, Hong Kong Baptist University ( www.hkbu.edu.hk)
Overview
This article describes an effective model of database-facilitated mentoring in the Practicum and School Partnership (PSP) committee at Hong Kong Baptist University. An integrated and shared database (PSP Database) was used to support the process of faculty mentoring of new members to the PSP committee. This database captured both tacit knowledge and experience of the existing committee members and made such assets easily accessible to PSP newcomers. This strengthened and helped to build up the initial mentoring relationship between old and new members by promoting organized, systematic and proactive guidance that enabled new members to be familiar enough with task details so as to make immediate contributions. Such enhanced operational effectiveness and team collaboration are essential to the complex and data-intense process of matching student teachers with suitable field-practice opportunities. With limited human resources, consisting of a team of full-time instructors taking on this extra administrative workload, we have successfully placed a large number of student teachers in appropriate field-practice positions by using this dual model of mentoring and data management.
Budget Constraints and Limited Human Resource Power
Large-scale student-teacher field practice is much more complex and interactive than simply matching the specialty of a student teacher to a school with such subjects available. The PSP committee members must have access to both detailed student background and school particulars. To overcome this obstacle, we have introduced a database to support the PSP team. The PSP team is required to match a student's specialty field of study with currently available field-practice opportunities provided by any of the secondary schools in Hong Kong at a particular time. Due to budget constraints and limited human resource power, an integrated and shared database of student information and near real-time data of schools gathered by different committee members must be openly shared within the PSP committee.
Mentoring is Collaborative and Promotes Professional Learning
Mentoring of new members to the PSP enables the committee to perform its duties with minimum resources. Mentoring in educational institutes is traditionally perceived as the mentoring of a student by a professor or senior. In the PSP committee, however, mentoring is collaborative and promotes professional learning among colleagues, while focusing on the daily work of the teaching staff and the administrative tasks such as student-teacher field placement. Routine classroom lecturing d'es not require this type of dynamic and data-intensive collaboration; thus, intercollegiate mentoring has traditionally played a less prominent role. In student-teacher field placement, mentoring within the PSP committee greatly enhances the process of making tacit knowledge explicit. Through communication facilitated by data availability, and the ability to generate tailored reports of student information and school openings, PSP committee members are led to discuss, reflect upon, reappraise and interrogate each other's recommendations for student placement. This leads to the optimal match and results in satisfaction on part of both the student and school.
