Teachers As Mentors (PDF)

Aram Ayalon has been a professor of secondary education since, 1989 first in the State University of New York College at Potsdam and then in the department of Teacher Education at Central Connecticut State University. He has published and conducted research in the areas of multicultural education, teacher as a mentor, school-university partnership, and action research. In 2008 he was visiting professor in Tel Aviv University where he taught qualitative research and teacher-as mentor courses. He now serves as school board member in the New Britain school district, an urban school district in the greater Hartford, Connecticut area. Born in a Kibbutz in Israel, Dr. Ayalon graduated from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in Animal Science, and after working as a high school science teacher in Tucson, Arizona; graduated with a Ph.D. in curriculum instruction from University of Arizona. Deborah W. Meier is currently at New York University's Steinhardt School of Education, as senior scholar a as well as Board member and director of New Ventures at Mission Hill, director and advisor to Forum for Democracy and Education, and on the Board of The Coalition of Essential Schools. Meier has spent more than four decades working in public education as a teacher, writer and public advocate. She began her teaching career as a kindergarten and headstart teacher in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City schools. She was the founder and teacher-director of a network of highly successful public elementary schools in East Harlem. In 1985 she founded Central Park East Secondary School, a New York City public high school in which more than 90% of the entering students went on to college, mostly to 4-year schools. During this period she founded a local Coalition center, which networked approximately fifty small Coalition-style K-12 schools in the city.