Fact Sheet on Ongoing Training of Mentees Available
The Mentoring Resource Center, the training and TA provider for the U.S. Department of Education's Student Mentoring grantees, has just released Enriching the Mentoring Experience Through Ongoing Mentee Training, which can be downloaded at http://www.edmentoring.org/pubs/factsheet29.pdf.
Mentoring programs often provide some form of initial orientation or training for youth participants, but this Fact Sheet explores how ongoing training for mentees over the course of their mentoring relationships can help build new skills, ease the match through its ups and downs, and provide opportunities for reflection and personal growth. Strategies for developing an ongoing training curriculum are provided, along with a sample agenda of how these trainings might be structured over the course of a school year.
If you are currently doing ongoing training of your mentees, please share your thoughts about the topics you cover and how this works best in practice.
Oops, I misread the title and talked about ongoing training for mentors. Hopefully you'll find it helpful anyway. :)
Thanks for your thoughts about mentor training, christyc. Sounds like a really good approach...
We should have put "mentee" in italics or underlined it or something to make it stand out in the issue title. But we thought it would be fun to explore what it might look like if folks put as much care in to ongoing training for youth as they do for mentors.
Each month we meet with our mentors for an hour and usually spend half the time doing ongoing training and half hearing from mentors about how things are going. I feel (and mentors have told us) that this is extremely beneficial and aids in the success of mentor relationships.
As far as material we use, we review our pre-match training annually so we can add things we've learned at conferences, update the stories and scenarios we use, and make sure we clarify issues that mentors seem to be struggling with. (For example, one year we had a few mentors that completed their commitment, but didn't take the last step to do a proper closure. We modified our training to be really clear about the importance of a good closure, using examples from both good and bad experiences we've had. Since then, we haven't had any mentors fizzle out at the end.) We bring any new material we add to the training to our monthly mentor meeting and use it for our ongoing training, as well as articles we pick up on boundaries, praise vs. encouragement, or other topics that can apply to mentoring. We have a very high rate of retention with our mentors (we require a one year commitment, but over 50% of our mentors are in year 2 or beyond and we haven't had any mentors close early in the last 2 years) and I believe this is mainly due to the extensive training we offer them.