The Problem For the past 10 years, incoming students in the UW-Whitewater School Psychology Program have been paired with identified high risk students in the community school system through a program we call Straight Talk Mentoring. The graduate students meet with their mentees weekly throughout the school year for two years prior to heading off for their internships. The feedback from the students, the children, and the school staff has been almost uniformly positive over this time period. When asked, the graduate students will report that they valued both the relationship as well as learning about the struggles that their children faced. In fact, the opportunity to engage in this program is often cited by applicants as a major reason they selected UW-Whitewater. Although the faculty in the program are convinced that the mentoring experience is contributory to the overall professional preparation of the students, there is debate regarding whether the experience has common effects across students or whether each student is affected idiosyncratically. The program's curriculum is guided by what are known as the Domains of Training Competency, a set of 11 professional practice competencies that were developed by the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) and that form the backbone of their program accreditation exercise. UW-Whitewater's School Psychology Program has Full Accreditation from NASP, thus all of the 11 competencies are respresented in the curriculum in some form. Indeed, every syllabi in the program notes which Training Competency will be addressed in that course. In contrast, the mentoring experience has not been formally structured to address any one or more of these competencies. I am curious if it does, in fact. This research will investigate the reported effects of the mentoring experience across a cohort of first year students. Summer 2008

Evidence of Student Learning & Methods of Analysis Hypothesis: Through the completion of structured reflective journals, school psychology graduate students will identify how the experience of mentoring addresses one or more of the program's Domains of Training as put forward by National Association of School Psychologists. During the first week of each month, November through April of the 2008-2009 academic year, each participant will submit a Structured Reflective Journal (see link) entry on that month's experience as a mentor. Participants will be assigned a number code by the Psychology Department administrative assistant and known only by her. Individual monthly entries will be submitted to the PI through the D2L survey application. Upon receipt, the PI will print the entry and delete the electronic content. Hardcopy entries will be stored in a locked file in the PI's office at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. The collected journals will be analyzed by independent raters for common themes that link to one or more of the Domains of Training Competency adapted by the School Psychology Program. Raters will use the Coding Form (see link) to examine the students' Structured Reflective Journals for themes that link to the Domains of Training Competency as defined in the Coding Manual (see link). Structured Reflective Journal Coding Form Coding Manual

Project Summary In the UW-Whitewater graduate program in School Psychology, our students engage in a weekly mentoring experience with individual high risk children in the local school district for the two years they are on campus prior to internship. We are not certain what it is that they learn through this experience; that is, how the mentoring contributes to their overall competency as school psychologists. I have enlisted a cohort of first year students to reflect about their experiences on a monthly basis and submit those reflections anonymously. At the end of this year, a team of raters will attempt to code those reflections along dimensions of 11 articulated "training competencies" to determine which, if any, are most germane to the mentoring experience. .

Ahmed, Z., Hutter, L., &. Plaut., J. (2008). Reflection. Higher Education Service-Learning. Scotts Valley, CA: Learn and Serve: America's National Service-Learning Clearinghouse. http://www.servicelearning.org/ Mentoring in this context is service learning. The students are engaging in community service while they are learning the skill of an educator. Hutter and Plaut extolled the virtues of reflection: "Reflection activities guide students toward discovering, exploring, and evaluating relationships between the course content as they encounter it in readings, lectures, and discussions, and their experiences in the community." Additional Resources: Fagen, T., & Sachs Wise, P. (2000). School psychology: Past, present, and future. Bethesda, MD: National Association of School Psychologists. Harrison, P., & Prus, J. (2008). Best practices in integrating Best Practices V content with NASP standards. In A. Thomas & J. Grimes (Eds.), Best practices in school psychology V. Bethesda, MD: National Association of School Psychologists. Herrera, C., Grossman, J., Kauh, T. J., Feldman, A. F., & McMaken, J. (2008). Making a Difference in Schools: The Big Brothers Big Sisters School-Based Mentoring Impact. Philadelphia: Public/Private Ventures Project. National Association of School Psychologists (1994). Standards for training and field placement programs in school psychology. Bethesda, MD: Author. Swerdlik, M. E., & French, J. L. (2000). School Psychology Training for the 21st Century: Challenges and Opportunities. School Psychology Review, 29, 577-588.

Preliminary Results, Findings, Conclusions, & Implications The final opportunity for submission of reflections is May, 2009, so data analysis will not be accomplished until that time. April 2009

Career Relevance & Impact I approached the Faculty College week with what I hoped was an open mind but what I feared was a much less optimistic perspective. Over my career, I have participated in many workshops focused on student learning and seldom found them at all helpful to the students that I teach in the Graduate School. From the first meeting, however, I was disabused of any notion that this would be just another group of earnest young professors swapping tricks and techniques while trying to answer "how do we get these freshmen to learn?" The week was designed such that virtually every moment had relevance to each of our individual concerns, allowing for both that intensive individual focus as well as a broader exchange of cross-discipline and cross-student insights. I looked forward to each day. The Summer Institute really solidified my new interest in SOTL issues. The WTF/WTS staff were very accomplished and professional in their approach, and they created an atmosphere in which I felt free to demonstrate my ignorance without fear (a critical aspect, I believe). Working alongside fellow Scholars and Fellows was equally helpful and allowed us to both learn from one another as well as get a firm sense of the high bar set by our cohort. As I move into the last years of my career, increasing my focus on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning seems a natural evolution, and I intend fully to pursue it.