Mentoring
“Mentoring is sharing knowledge, skills, life experience to guide another towards reaching their full potential; it’s a journey of shared discovery. Mentoring is a positive, supportive relationship, encouraging young people to develop to their fullest potential. A mentor can be a role model, coach, sounding board, voice of reason, counsellor and a trusted resource. Mentors care and assure their mentees that they are not alone in dealing with day-to-day challenges. They help them believe that they matter.”
Benefits of Mentoring
Individualized Goal Setting: Each week or fortnight, mentees, students meet with their mentors to assess their academic progress and to set individual short-and long-term goals, develop an action plan, and learn time management and planning strategies. This intentional, interaction helps the student develop a universal set of skills - goal setting, adaptability, and reflection - that are necessary for success in school, college, career, and life.
Relationships Built on Trust: Mentors serve as a thought partner for students on their academic journey and help empower students to become autonomous learners and agents of their change. They express an understanding of students’ aspirations and fears and support their success by acting as an advocate for students’ best interests.Sourav*, a 9th STD student, described his mentor relationship: “Now that I have my mentor, it helps me a lot; if I ever have something on my mind and I can’t do my work, I just go to him and let it out and he’s there.”(*name changed)Building relationships with students includes alignment with home life, achieved through regular communication and periodic mentor-student meetings with parents and guardians.
Developing Self-Awareness and Fostering Passions: An essential component mentoring sessions is self-reflection, which gives students the chance to build awareness around their ability to set and follow through on academic and social goals. Students who practice individual goal-setting and reflection over time are better able to accurately assess their strengths, as well as recognize and act on areas for self-improvement.
Education and Learning: Mentors elevate and escalate 'knowledge transfer,' which is useful in shortening a learning curve.Time Savings and Focus: A mentor can help to ensure that students will work through any frustrations or concerns they may have, help them build the skills they need for success, encouraging them to stay, work on the issue, solve and move on.The Road Not Taken - YetYogi Berra a famous baseball player once said: “If you see a fork in the road, take it.” In today’s fast-moving world, there are more forks in the road than ever before. Change comes fast and the future is unsure. What we can be sure of is who we are and what we care about. As an Individual, we have to be adaptable and realistic, and mentoring can help form important perspectives and character traits. There is an old Chinese Proverb, which reads: “When the wind of change blows, some people build walls, others build windmills.” If you can harness change in your favor you will eventually find your path. Have a great journey.
Benefits of Mentoring
Children See ... Children do...