CEPA Güímar is an Adult Learning Centre in Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain). Most of our students are Secondary Education learners. We’ve been working on how to teach and learn through peer-mentoring, which is the objective of our Grundtvig Learning Association, since September 2012 on. That means that we’ve been developing strategies and activities to do so.
Here is an extract of every methodological approach we’ve undertaken. Below each summary there’s a link to click and visit our blog, with all information related .
2012-2013
-> “Teams of experts“
It has been developed in our school in the following way:
- DEFINITION: Teams of students become “experts” in a given subject or topic. That way they can share their knowledge and abilities with their classmates. In other words, their partners will learn from those “teams of experts“, which rotate with every different chosen topic.
- Every student has the chance to belong to a “team of experts”.
- The topic each team becomes “an expert” in, is provided by the teacher, and it’s part of Secondary Education syllabus for adult education.
- We’ve taken notes of several sessions in our blog:
- Spanish Language and Literature
- English Language
->”Using a blog to do a Market Research“
Our institution chose “Entrepreneurship” among other basic skills to focus on peer-mentoring activities, and we organized this one to accomplish that objective.
2013-2014
-> Mathematical Olympiad
Our learners participated last year in the Second Edition, and they got good marks. So we’ll participate on the Third Mathematical Olympiad this year.
An advanced Maths learner is mentoring their partners once a week, so they can solve Maths problems, similiar to those solved in previous editions and new ones too, of course. The aim is getting ready for the contest, thanks to peer-mentoring, and at the same time, stimulating our learners’ Maths talent and skills. The Olympiad will be held in May. We’re using the Evaluation Survey we agreed in Germany.
-> WhatsApp group as a way to improve Spanish spelling through Peer-mentoring
The purpose and justification of this peer-mentoring activity
- “Improving Spanish spelling” is part of the Spanish syllabus for Secondary Education, and Spanish Languague and Literature is obviuosly the subject where we pay special attention on this feature.
- We introduced several digital articles related to the convinience of spelling correctly in order to have a chance get a job (Curriculum Vitae), to offer a good public image of oneself on the web, such as Facebook, forums, blogs, twitter, etc., and to help our partners and friends not to make spelling mistakes by means of posting or emailing correct texts.
-Those articles confirm the fact that you learn to spell correctly when you read correct words. And the opposite: if you are constantly reading mispellings, that’s what you learn, and you’ll mispell too. AND you contaminate your chats and emails with mispellings, which means you are harming your friends’ spelling. This is where PEER-MENTORING can be a useful tool.
