Coaching and Mentoring: Mentoring

What is Mentoring in HE?

• Predominantly viewed as “peer mentoring”
• defined as “...guidance, support, knowledge and opportunities for whatever period the mentor and protégé deem this help necessary...Burlew (1991, p214)
• An assistive relationship in which two individuals of similar age/or experience work together , either informally or formally, to fulfil some kind of informational and/or emotional need Terrion and Leonard (2007)

Mentorship
• Contribute positively to the undergraduate’s experience in Higher Education
• Improves knowledge, performance and skills
• Identity and the notion of “community” of practice
• Emphasis upon mentoring “success and retention” (Andrews, and Clark, 2011; McCary et al, 2011; Sanders and Higham, 2012; Snowden, 2013; Thomas, 2012)

How?
• increased level of support
• resources and support services and promote a sense of belonging
• Productive use of time, best use of the resources access to “inside knowledge”

Through the process of

• enables students to utilise helping and support strategies
• provides effective role modelling
• ​enhances participation and engagement in the academic community
• model of positive behaviour that reflects success and experience - acting as a powerful transmitter of values and attitudes, reinforcing successful learning.
• Mentors contribute to the “self–efficacy,” of mentees by procuring skills that Alred and Garvey (2000) suggest enhance learning and the production of knowledge.

Based upon Barnett and Coate
2005

Mentor Assisted Learning?

• A model of learning that applies the principles of mentorship to aid learning development and places the learner at the heart of the learning experience
• Adopts the principles of mentorship and heautagogical learning and the concept of “learning spaces”

Successful Mentor Assisted Learning

• Helps the student inhabit and navigate the various systems and structures of HEI and the community
• Helps the student inhabit their own internalised patterns of reasoning
• Promotes reality
• Engaged community focussed learning
• Multi and inter-disciplinary......
• Provides the opportunity to utilise “space” – draw upon the experience and engage within it...harnessing the energy/experience to develop self learning