Project Eye-to-Eye

Cambridge School in partnership with the Pennington School is sponsoring a chapter of Project Eye-To-Eye. As a national mentoring program, Project Eye-to-Eye matches college and high school students with LD/ADHD, acting as tutors, role models and mentors, with elementary, middle, and high school students with LD/ADHD in order to empower these students and help them find success.

 Research shows that the most important element in the life success of labeled individuals is not IQ or academic success, but self-esteem. Project Eye-To-Eye’s fundamental mission is to give younger labeled students hope by bringing a mentor into their lives who can model success and empower younger students to imagine a positive future for themselves.

Project Eye-To-Eye mentors will aim to provide their mentees skills that facilitate academic empowerment. These skills break down in the following areas:

• Self-Advocacy: Mentors will work with students to become positive self advocates for their needs as learners.
• Meta-cognitive skills: Research on resilience and success shows that meta-cognitive skills, the ability to know how one learns, is one of the most fundamental skills leading to a successful life. Project Eye-To-Eye mentors will engage their mentees in an ongoing conversation about their learning styles and help them develop an asset based understanding of their learning.

Beyond the work of academic empowerment, the Project Eye-To-Eye Programming Model relies on the use of art, broadly defined, as a medium of empowerment. Through art, Project Eye-To-Eye children have the opportunity to access their gift for project-based, spatial, tactile/kinetic, and interpersonal learning within an academic environment. The experience of art empowers students to develop their strengths and validates the unique gifts that are too often ignored within a traditional educational paradigm. The use of art enables both the students and mentors to participate in a dialogue about social and personal change, empowering them to envision a different educational experience for themselves.

For more information please visit the Project Eye-to-Eye website: www.projecteyetoeye.org