View comments from Lesley Peterson, Teacher Development Advisor at Eastern Institute of Technology (EIT), taken at the Symposium in Hamilton, July 2011.
Key content
Ideas on 'growing mentors' in a tertiary organisation
Transcript
One of the things that I’ve found in my research was that it’s really easy to arbitrarily choose people to be mentors because they are senior people in the organisation or they have some skills that you might be looking for. I think you can grow mentors, but I think that it’s really useful to have some sort of baseline skill or knowledge capability or capacity in the area that you want them to mentor. So you can have very generic mentoring or you can have very specific mentoring. So for us at EIT with the literacy and numeracy, we have three advisors who are very skilled in literacy and numeracy. Doesn’t make them mentors, but because of the support net of the work we’ve set up with them, I believe that’s growing them as mentors for others. And one of my key questions that I’ll talk about this afternoon too is that question around who mentors the mentor? So growing mentors doesn't mean, "Well because you’re a mentor and you’re good at what you do, thanks very much, see you later and do a good job" – but it’s what do you do to support that, and have a continuing support of the people who are taking on those roles.
In the literature there’s a lot around a whole lot of attributes of a good mentor, lots of skills and qualities. But as well, I believe, there has to be a very very clear, robust structure, I suppose, of criteria of what the organisation’s looking for in the mentor, and that obviously comes from what the purpose of mentoring is for that organisation. So that can include, from my point of view, what I’ve been suggesting is things like promotion and progression, their level of involvement in the organisation, how active they are in actually working with other staff and supporting other staff, how interested they are in being involved in different initiatives and projects in the organisation.
And so getting some sort of really clear framework of the criteria of what a good mentor is, but taking in all the different elements of what might provide evidence of that – rather than like I said earlier, this person's really skilled at teaching therefore they’ll make a good mentor.