Organizing project activities through the mentoring model ‘teacher — university student — schoolchild’

Abstract

The article describes the ways of forming an educational space with a high developmental potential, which uses mentoring to improve university students’ and schoolchildren’s skills of participating in project activities and strengthen traditional Russian spiritual and moral values. We describe the essence and specifics of the concepts of ‘mentoring’ and ‘project activity’. We consider mentoring to be a key way to develop human potential, which is the basis of the socio-economic development of the country. We also analyze the prospects of implementing the ‘teacher — university student — schoolchild’ mentoring model in project activities, which is a special form of educational work that forms the ability to use information, as well as formulate a problem and steps for its solution — that is, the basic ability to conduct research, which is necessary for becoming a specialist in the future. Dentistry, pharmacy and preventive medicine are the fields in which projects with a medical focus are implemented usschoolchildren who, under the guidance of mentors (university students) and a teacher, carry out a project on medicinal plants: study the methods of creating a herbarium, collect medicinal plants, describe them in Latin and Russian, learn various medicinal forms of their use and carry out a comparative analysis. This allows university students and schoolchildren to jointly go through all stages of research, ending with writing of an article and participating in a conference with a report. The main feature of this interaction is that mentors have a small age difference with schoolchildren, which makes communication and knowledge transfer easier: the ‘psychological barrier’ is removed and schoolchildren study in a friendly and comfortable atmosphere. In turn, university students are supervised by a teacher-mentor, who can always steer the research or interaction in the right direction. Such a system of collaboration is more effective and productive, since the exchange of experience and knowledge takes place not in a strict academic framework, but in a relaxed atmosphere aimed at results and creative thinking. The article draws conclusions about the importance of pedagogical mentoring as an integral component of project activities and an effective means of professional self-determination of schoolchildren. We raise questions about the need to justify the choice of mentoring methods for the implementation of project activities of schoolchildren, activating and facilitating work at each stage.