Giving Compass' Take:

• The Summit Learning Program helps foster positive and productive teacher-student mentorships and spurs community connections through its mentoring model.

• Are there opportunities for your philanthropy to support mentoring? 

• Read about the power of mentoring relationships. 

Teachers are at the heart of Summit Learning classrooms, and mentoring is an essential part of the Summit Learning experience. To date this school year, teachers, school staff, and students have held more than 3.8 million minutes of in-person mentoring within the Summit Learning program—the equivalent of watching more than 31,600 two-hour movies.

More than 80,000 students are enrolled in the Summit Learning program, which is designed so that each student meets regularly with a teacher or other adult in the school who serves as a resource for that student’s academic, mental, social, and overall development. This mentoring model provides individualized support to students and creates a deeper connection to the school community—inspiring students to achieve their own success.

To celebrate National Mentoring Month, we’re looking back at how Summit Learning assists great teachers in developing strong mentoring relationships with students and helps foster student collaboration.

Traci McCullough, a teacher at Chicago International Charter Schools (CICS) Bucktown, managed by Distinctive Schools, which is participating in Summit Learning, says that the opportunity to mentor her students is invaluable. “I genuinely believe that as educators, you are to teach the whole child.

The Summit Learning program fosters richer, more meaningful relationships between teachers and students and students and their peers. The technology which supports the program, the Summit Learning Platform, helps empower teachers to enhance the quality of student-teacher interactions by helping teachers develop a more holistic perspective of how students are doing across classes, support student learning, as well as receive input from students on what they want to talk about in advance of one-on-one mentoring sessions.

Read the full article about enhancing teacher-student mentoring at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.