Michael J. Karcher, Ed.D., Ph.D.

Michael J. Karcher, Ed.D., Ph.D., is the K-12 editor. He is a Professor of Counseling in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he coordinates the School Counseling Training Program. He conducts research on school-based and cross-age peer mentoring as well as on adolescent connectedness and pair counseling. He authored the Cross-age Mentoring Program (CAMP) program that is currently implemented in by Boy With A Ball (under the name Velocity) at Harlandale High School (see http://www.boywithaball.com/news-velocity.html). Dr. Karcher also has helped Big Brothers Big Sisters of America to strengthen their High School Bigs program (see www.highschoolbigs.org) Professor Karcher also conducted one of the first large-scale school-basedstudies, the Study of Mentoring in the Learning Environment (SMILE, 2003-2006) funded by the William T. Grant Foundation (www.schoolbasedmentoring.com), and currently he is co-Principal Investigator (with J. Mitchel Miller) of an OJJDP study to better understand the role of advocacy and related interactions in effectively mentoring delinquent youth in the national Youth Advocate Programs, Inc. Dr. Karcher’s is co-editor with David L. DuBois of the Handbook of Youth Mentoring (2005, 2013) and co-edited with Michael Nakkula, Play, talk, learn: Promising practices in youth mentoring (2010). Karche oversees the “K-12” corner, which covers issues involving peer and school-based