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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Sunday, June 29, 2008
Career mentorship done right
Here’s my problem with “job shadowing” and other career experience programs that place young students with professionals to learn about their jobs — too often the kids are just checking a box on a form.
In some cases, the kids are required to complete so many job shadows, sometimes up to three or four in their high school careers. And, too often, there is little effort to match the kids with the right mentors or even with the right careers they might actually want to pursue. Some kids are reaching for a second or third job to shadow, choosing something they are just vaguely interested in.
That’s not how they do it in Darke County.
Eileen Litchfield, the coordinator of Darke County’s Career Mentorship Program, first called me almost 10 years ago. I was a reporter in the DDN’s Troy bureau then, covering the northern Miami Valley, and Eileen had a Darke County student who was interested in journalism. (For more about the program, go here.)
I do many journalism job shadows. As the paper’s education reporter, I’m usually one of the first contacts for such requests and I’ve always felt a particular responsibility to help kids learn about this profession, whether through job shadows, speaking to them in groups, etc.
From the very beginning, the Darke County kids were different. Mostly, they were really interested in journalism. They asked smart questions. They rarely looked bored.
The key was on the front end. Litchfield does a lot of work screening the kids to find out what they are really interested in. And when she finds a successful mentor, she won’t let them get away. That’s how I’ve stayed involved with the program for almost a decade. She sends me one or two students every year.
Not all of them, probably not even most of them, continue on to study journalism in college. But all of them start a genuine interest. And my time is well spent with a student like that.
Litchfield tells me she is moving on from the program, which is a partnership of the school districts in Darke County through its educational service center. I’ll miss working with her, but fortunately the program will continue under new leadership. To Litchfield, I say good luck on your new endeavors. To the rest of the Miami Valley’s school districts, there is a good model to study in Darke County.
I wish I had a list of their names, the Darke County kids who mentored with me through the years. But I remember many of them, even if their names escape me.
Let me tell you one story of mentorship gone right.
In 2004, I was asked to work with a couple of other reporters who were investigating former Wright State University basketball coach Paul Biancardi’s involvement in a recruiting scandal when he was an assistant coach at Ohio State University. Part of my role was to fight Ohio State for records.
On the day one of the Darke County students was visiting, we hit the jackpot. A huge package of records finally arrived from Ohio State after weeks of wrangling. They contained a list of numbers called by Paul Biancardi’s cell phone while he was working there.
Our other reporters had obtained from other sources the cell phone numbers used by a shadowy Yugoslavian sports agent accused of taking money to shop foreign players to American colleges, in violation of recruiting rules. Biancardi had denied any significant contact with the agent.
The student joined me and a half dozen reporters gathered in a conference room with the box of records. She took a highlighter just like the rest of us and noted line after line of calls between Biancardi and the agent. By the end of the day, we had built a pretty strong case contradicting Biancardi’s story, and the student had a real taste of investigative journalism.
“That was pretty cool,” she said, on her way out the door after contributing to what would become a major front page story that Sunday.
I thought the same thing. Every job shadow should go like this.
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