The Peer Observation: “Mentore” Project at University of Palermo

During the last 6 years at the University of Palermo, a group of academics has been involved in a project called “MENTORE” (“Modifying and ENhancing Teaching through peer Observation and Reflections with Experts.”) The objectives of the project are to help teachers improve their teaching, through the help of two mentors; to experiment new approaches in pilot courses to extend, if useful, to other ones; and to change the traditional model of academic teaching based on one single teacher with the class to go toward a model where there is a group of teachers working together in search of improvements. All the participants of the MENTORE project attend to lectures/workshops on teaching and learning and participate in meetings where they share experiences and ideas. In the program, each participant has two mentors who help him or her to improve the quality of his or her teaching. The two mentors are other academics who participate in the program. Indeed, each participant is both mentor and mentee during the same year. Mentors follow some of the lectures of the mentee, meet the students in the final part of the course in order to collect their opinion, and, finally, meet the mentee in order to discuss the actions to carry out for improving the quality of his or her teaching. This chapter describes the aforementioned peer observation practice adopted at the University of Palermo and focuses on the role of mentors describing their activities during the peer observation process.