Girl's Mentoring Event

We have some pretty fantastic kids at school - kids who not only work hard, but also students who look out for one another. A group of incredible senior girls decided to start a girl's mentoring program called the Knights in Shining Armor. This organization brings together friendly, motivated, successful senior and freshman girls who want to get involved in their school. Together, they do a variety of activities: yoga, crafts, book clubs, etc., lead by different teachers throughout the school. During these activities, the freshmen can ask for advice from their older, wiser peers, or just network with one another and make new friends.
"Knitted Heart." by mararie is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Just before Valentine's Day, I offered to facilitate a craft afternoon where students could make cards or little candy boxes. I provided hot chocolate with heart marshmallows, and the girls brought brownies and popcorn to snack on during the craft hour. Listening to these smart, funny, strong, and friendly girls work together and offer their expertise on all things school made my heart happy. I didn't know many of the girls before the event, but I left with a smile on my face that there are such wonderful things going on at our school - events that are entirely student organized and student driven. These girls recognized a need for a mentoring group that could lead their younger peers on the right path to success, so they made one. And I know I am not alone in my pride for these lovely young women, as a number of teachers wanted to know what they could do to contribute to such a fantastic organization. I think I certainly learned an important lesson from them: do not wait for good things to happen, make them happen!

Evaluating Resources

According to the PA Core Standards, students must be able to evaluate resources based on credibility, relevance, currency, accuracy and bias. Many students understand that they need to use "good" resources, but find it much more difficult to define exactly what this means. In order to help my students to determine if a resource is worthwhile for a particular project, I devised a rubric for evaluation. Teachers use rubrics in order to make subjective evaluations more concrete, so it only makes sense to teach students to do the same thing in their evaluation of resources. I urge students to recognize that the same source might receive excellent scores for one research topic, but only mediocre scores for another. The research question or thesis statement greatly influences which resources are most useful. I try to make this concept easy to conceive for students with a number of examples throughout the evaluation rubric. The best part of having a very structured form for evaluation is that it only takes a few minutes to go over, and then students have a reference point for the rest of their research endeavors. After using the rubric for several projects, students no longer need to use the physical rubric because they begin to look for elements of good resources automatically.

Please feel free to modify and use the Evaluation of Resources rubric with your students. If you repost this rubric, please provide proper credit!