Tele-mentoring

Like many mentors with Spark, I’m quite busy. I typically have full slates of meetings, phone calls, or “to-do’s” I need to accomplish during precious little “desk time.” I also travel a fair bit, visiting the regions where we have programming or making fundraising rounds in New York or Washington or elsewhere.

So, this week, I missed Isiah at the office. And I was really bummed about it. I was in San Francisco for a set of meetings with stakeholders, our great annual fundraiser, and a national board meeting. It’s common for mentors to miss a session or two. The Spark program staff work with mentors to forecast days missed way ahead of time, which is important so that students know in advance that they won’t be seeing their mentor that day and therefore won’t be disappointed – at least not as much. 

I told Isiah at Match Night that I would be away this week. Since all mentors have to be cleared by a background check, ordinarily we can’t just pass the student off to a colleague. We’d have to skip the apprenticeship session and make it up later (we build in make-up days into the schedule). A majority of our partner companies are now hosting five or more students, in which case fellow mentors in the same office can fill in, which makes it easier. Fortunately for Isiah, he is doing his apprenticeship at Spark, which means he can still come to the office and work with one of my colleagues, because we’ve all been cleared to work with young people.

Isiah came to the office to work with my colleague Amanda, who is as terrific with students as she is with me. I’m glad, because it was an important week. After mapping out our project last session, this week we needed to accomplish the first task, which is creating the survey for Isiah’s peers to determine what they’d like to see on a section of the Spark website for students.

After finishing up a meeting in downtown San Francisco, I walked down to the Embarcadero and got on FaceTime with Isiah for a little bit. I was able to show him some of the beautiful landscape of the city and tell him a bit about why I was there and what I was doing. We were also able to chat a bit about the survey.

He and Amanda had already made good progress on it. They had outlined some of the questions. We want to gather some basic information, of course. So, there were questions on who the respondent is, their gender, their age, what grade they were in, and the like. We then talked about how best to get at some of their interests. We decided to list out a number of ideas and ask people to tick the ones they’d like to see. Other questions were more open-ended.

Isiah’s homework is to get his peers to take the survey. Next week, we’ll work on analyzing the data and using it to start designing the elements of the web page. I was trained early on in my career as an analyst and really enjoy working with data, making sense of it and using it to solve problems. So, I’m especially eager to sit with Isiah next week and go through that process, hopefully sharing some insights into how to do analysis. I like that we’re doing the survey in this project, so we can blend some quantitative work with the more creative aspects of designing the page and promoting it. It feels like a more well rounded experience that way. We’re doing a little math as well as English.

Source: Spark student report cards &
Univ. of Chicago Consortium on School Research

This reminds me how impressed I’ve been by the strides our students make in their core course grades in school during their Spark experience. We are not an academic intervention, yet we are seeing some effect on academic performance. Spark students in Chicago enter our program markedly below the district average in GPA. When they leave the program, they have made significant gains. They start approaching the district average in their GPAs.

My hunch is that the apprenticeship approach gets students more interested in learning. Their level of engagement goes up, and therefore they do better in school. But I also think that many of our mentors do academic-focused things as part of the apprenticeship. Our students do analysis and work on spreadsheets. They are writing, doing research, making presentations. These are all things that students need to do to be successful in their coursework.

Spark is so much more than helping students do better in school. But, doing better in school is one big part of our impact. When students improve their grades, they boost their confidence, and their desire to learn more. It can be the beginning of a virtuous cycle academically. One that we hope will persist with our students for a long time.