Dr. Dave:                      Hello. And welcome to the KnolShare with Dr. Dave podcast. I am Dr. Dave Cornelius, your host. Today, my discussion partner is Dr. Charles Collingwood, the Math Department Chair at Sahuaro High School in Tucson, Arizona. He is a pioneering STEM educator who influenced many high school students to go on to college. We have had many great conversations over the years about transforming education to include more real world practices and applications. Well, let's begin. Dr. Charles Collingwood, thank you for joining me today. How are you doing?

Dr. Charles Col...:          I'm doing great, man. Thank you.

Dr. Dave:                      That's just great, man. So I'm just going to jump right in and start peppering you with questions right off the bat.

Dr. Charles Col...:          Lay it on me, lay it on me.

Dr. Dave:                      Lay it on you. There you go. So look, as a teacher, what are some of the guiding principles that you want to share with your students that would really affect their ability to learn?

Dr. Charles Col...:          I think the first thing that students have to understand that learning itself is a life-long commitment, right? As human beings, to live in society, we have to learn how to function. So the process of learning, we talk about it a lot in schools, but basically, the process of learning happens throughout our life and we've got to apply that to this special context of schooling and I think that's important for students to understand because I like to have them understand that you have learned many things in your lifespan. They could talk about some of them play music, some of them play sports, they play all these things and they have to learn them at some point. So this process of learning, we talk about it in the context of schooling, but in fact, it happens throughout your whole life. I think once they understand that, then it's much easier for me to teach them these concepts that they are not really familiar with.

Dr. Dave:                      Okay. So it's learning throughout in our lives and in many different contexts. So I want to talk about this mentoring program that you started at Sahuaro High School in 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. What were some of the goals for the mentoring program that you had?

Dr. Charles Col...:          One of the issues that we have at the school that I'm working at is that you have quite a few students that are not really engaged in the curriculum that is being offered in many areas, right? So as I was having meetings over the summer and during the COVID spring, we started to talk about, man, how can we engage students more? What kind of ways can we do to engage students. And then I thought about it would be awesome if I could have a class where we are not really talking about any specific content, but the idea of learning, right, teaching yourself to learn, what it means to learn.

So they gave me the green light to cover the class. And I said, "Okay. I think I could do that." So I came up with this thing called mentoring class, right? A mentoring class where I had about 24 or 25 students in the class and about maybe 10 of them are what I call mentors, maybe usually juniors and seniors and then the rest of them were freshmen and sophomore students who I thought needed help.

So the idea was to introduce students probably for the first time into a learning environment without the pressure of a grade so to speak, right? So we are here to learn. There is no pressure. What I did is I got many community members to come in and speak with the students and stuff like that. And students were able to interact more in a job scene, right,