The National Mentoring Program was created in 2009 by the Division for Gifted and Outstanding Students in the Ministry of Education and is implemented by the Szold Institute. The program aims to cultivate future leaders in Israel. Highly gifted 10th and 11th graders are matched with top rate professionals in students’ areas of interest. They work for a year on a project of mutual interest. Forty-four per cent of students live in geographical or social periphery. The article details program rationale and phases, and presents results of qualitative program evaluation. Each of the 50 students who completed the first three cohorts of the program produced high quality university level work. Some students also received significant recognition by the professional community, publishing their work and presenting it in professional conferences.

This article presents a new classroom observations analysis tool (CLI-O: Class Learning Interactions -Observation tool). The CLI-O tool enables the collection of various data regarding the use of ICT tools, organization of learning, and teacher-student interactions in the lesson. Several examples demonstrating the use of CLI-O and some preliminary findings derived from this tool are presented. CLI-O was developed in order to answer the question: Is learning in an ICT-based environment characterized by a unique pedagogy expressed, for example, by student-centered pedagogy while the teacher serves as a guide who mediates learning using a variety of technological tools? For example, in lessons observed and analyzed by CLI-O in the present study, a large part of the learning was found to be whole class learning, mainly frontal learning, and the teacher was at the focus of the lesson. CLI-O supplies a systematic description of classroom processes and enables teachers, teacher educators, and researchers to examine the implementation of ICT in teaching and learning and perceive it as a gradual ongoing process of building a new pedagogy tailored to the needs of the 21 st century.

No abstract