The Peer Obervation: "Mentore" Project at the University of Palermo

Abstract

During the last six years, at the University of Palermo, a group of academics has been involved in a project called “MENTORE” (“Modifying and ENhancing Teaching through peer Observation and Reflections with Experts”). The objectives of the project are: to help teachers improve their teaching, through the help of two mentors; to experiment new approaches in pilot courses to extend, if useful, to other ones; and to change the traditional model of academic teaching based on one single teacher with the class to go towards a model where there is a group of teachers working together in search of improvements. All the participants of the MENTORE project attend to lectures/workshops on teaching and learning and participate to meetings where they share experiences and ideas. In the program, each participant has two mentors that help him/her to improve the quality of his/her teaching. The two mentors are other academics that participate to the program. Indeed, each participant is both mentor and mentee during the same year. Mentors follow some of the lectures of the mentee, meet the students in the final part of the course in order to collect their opinion and, finally, meet the mentee in order to discuss the actions to carry out for improving the quality of his/her teaching. This chapter describes the aforementioned peer observation practice adopted at the University of Palermo and focuses on the role of mentors describing their activities during the peer observation process