Problems of the Week Mentor Information

The Problems of the Week

The Math Forum's Problems of the Week provide an environment in which students can practice their mathematics problem solving and communication skills while solving non-routine problems. Students participate on a variety of levels, depending on their level of "subscription" - some teachers, parents, and students opt for either our full mentoring or scoring services. But most students choose to take advantage of our free service, in which we mentor as many students as possible without guaranteeing anyone a response. The mentors include Math Forum staff, volunteers such as yourself (who might be parents, teachers, retirees, engineers, college students, or just about anything else!), and pre-service teachers participating in our Online Mentoring Project through their math education classes. The goals of mentoring are to encourage improvement in the different aspects of problem solving and communication, to get students to revisit and revise their work, and to help the students feel a part of a community of learners that reaches beyond their classroom or their school. The Problem of the Week is conducted in English, and effective explanation of solutions is a key expectation for the students. You do not need to be a native speaker of English in order to qualify, but mentors must be able to communicate clearly and model the standards we hold for the students. We use a scoring rubric to summarize and keep track of student progress, and it enables us to focus our narrative comments on the most essential points while still giving the student some feedback on all aspects of their work. This system allows us to give good feedback to the students about what we expect and how we think they're doing in meeting those expectations. This rubric also provides sufficient structure for mentors so that our collective efforts are consistent. You can read more about this rubric on our scoring information page. The mentor training course consists of three steps. The first is to solve a problem and write a solution with the goal of achieving the "practitioner" level in all six of the categories. You'll submit a solution and then get feedback from us (much like the feedback that we give students). Once you've completed that, we'll teach you about scoring and replying to submissions, and you'll score and reply to three sample student submissions. After that, you'll score and reply to two more student submissions. As you complete each step, we will review your work and share what we've learned so that you become confident you can be an effective mentor in this setting. You'll have an opportunity to revise and improve your work at each step based on our feedback. While this may sound like a lot of work, it's important that we have confidence that all of our mentors are applying the scoring rubric consistently and that the feedback being sent to students is in the style that our research and experience has shown is effective in encouraging students to revise and improve their work. We've tried a lot of training methods over the years, and are hopeful that this one will allow us to more efficiently teach people about mentoring in our online environment. Once you've completed our training course, you'll be a member of the "cavalry" for the problem or problems in which you choose to work. This means that you will assign work to yourself when you have time. While there is no minimum requirement for your participation, our hope is that you would be able to commit at least two hours per problem (problems are posted every other week), or four hours per month. If, after reading this page, you still think this sounds interesting (we hope you do!), fill out our information request form and we'll send you information about how to start the training course. Thanks for your interest! -Annie Fetter, PoW Supervisor and Volunteer Mentor Trainer