Navigating the Tutor/Mentor Resource Library

I started this blog in 2005 and have posted more than 1000 articles. Prior to that I had been creating PDF essays that I shared here, and before the internet, I used printed newsletters (see archive) which reached up to 12,000 people by 2002. 

This represents 40 years asking the same questions over, and over each year. All focused on helping volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs reach k-12 youth in high poverty hours, with long-term efforts that transform the lives of both kids and volunteers.

I started asking these questions when I first became a tutor in 1973 then a program leader in 1975.  As a leader my role was to focus on creating a structure that would enable individual pairs of youth and volunteers to connect, build relationships, and provide a wide range of learning and mentoring support based on the needs of each individual student. Those needs kept changing from year-to-year, as they grew up. I also had to recruit those students and volunteers and keep them involved.  When we became a non profit in 1990, I had to learn how to raise money to pay the bills, too. 

So, I've learned much. I've collected a lot of information and produced a ton of material. Now, how do I help people navigate this?

I've tried many things, but below I'm going to show just a few.

The first website for the Tutor/Mentor Connection was created by one of my volunteers in 1998 and given the name http://www.tutormentorconnection.org  The graphic at the left was the original design on the home page of that website. You could click on any spoke and go to a page with information related to it. You can view this page in the Internet Archive. This site was rebuilt in 2006 by a team from IUPUI, then again in 2011 by a volunteer from IUPUI.

In 2008 the site crashed in August just prior to the annual Citywide Volunteer Recruitment Campaign, so Steve Roussos, a volunteer from the  University of Kansas, created a second site, named http://www.tutormentorexchange.net.   While the original site was working again in a few months I began to use the new site to host PDF essays that I had been creating to visually communicate the ideas and strategies that I had been building since 1975.  In 2011 when I formed Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC, I used this site as my primary website.

So, if you want to know what resources I have available, you need to take time to tour the site, opening every link, just like going into every store as you (used to) visit a new shopping mall.  To help you along an intern from South Korea created the video below in 2015.

When you're on this website be sure to look at the Mission, Vision and Strategy pages on the right side.

So that's one way to learn what information I host, but it's not a logical, step-by-stem learning guide.

Thus, a few years ago I created the concept  map shown below.

You start with the blue box at the top left, then work your way down, reading the linking text, and opening the links under each box to see what it points to. You might start just by reading through the entire concept map without opening any links. That will give you an overall understanding. Then go back and dig deeper.

Once again, I was lucky to have an Intern from South Korea do a visual introduction of this concept map. She created it using Prezi, then put that in a video.  Unfortunately the original Prezi is no longer available, but the video does a nice job.

 

Using these videos and concept map you should have enough of an understanding for you to be motivated to dig deeper, into the strategy essays and concept maps and the many articles on this blog.

In the first graphic of this article I wrote "what are all the things we need to know and do".  If you look at the tag cloud at the left, these words represent categories of knowledge that we need to know, if we're going to do everything needed to fill high poverty neighborhoods with well organized, well funded, non-school tutor, mentor and learning programs that help kids entering fist grade today be finishing 12th grade and headed on to college, vocational education and/or jobs 12 years later.

There is no short cut. ALL of these ideas need to be understood and implemented in every city and state of the US and the world.  

One of the tags is "Tipping Points" which represents actions that might make all of this more possible.  I included the graphic at the right in this article, suggesting that the body of ideas and library of links be hosted by a university (or more) and incorporated into a degree program intended to produce leaders who understood all of this information as they entered their careers.

Wona Chang was the intern from South Korea who created these two videos in 2015. Meet her and other interns on this site. 

If you're read this far, thank you.  Now think of ways you might enlist students from your own community to read these and create their own interpretations, just as Wona and past interns have done. Maybe that could be part of a class at a high school or university.

I'm on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Instagram. Find links here. I look forward to connecting with you and talking about these ideas and seeing how you are sharing them, or your own strategies.

If you'd like to help Fund the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC, click here.