Mentoring is a process for the informal transmission of
knowledge, social capital, and the psychosocial support perceived by the
recipient as relevant to work, career, or professional development; mentoring
entails informal communication, usually face-to-face and during a sustained
period of time, between a person who is perceived to have greater relevant
knowledge, wisdom, or experience (the mentor) and a person who is perceived to
have less (the protégé).
The focus of mentoring is to develop the whole person and so
the techniques are broad and require wisdom in order to be used appropriately. A
1995 study of mentoring techniques most commonly used in business found that
the five most commonly used techniques among mentors were:
Accompanying: making a commitment in a caring way, which
involves taking part in the learning process side-by-side with the learner.
Sowing: mentors are often confronted with the difficulty of
preparing the learner before he or she is ready to change. Sowing is necessary
when you know that what you say may not be understood or even acceptable to
learners at first but will make sense and have value to the mentee when the
situation requires it.
Catalyzing: when change reaches a critical level of
pressure, learning can escalate. Here the mentor chooses to plunge the learner
right into change, provoking a different way of thinking, a change in identity
or a re-ordering of values.
Showing: this is making something understandable, or using
your own example to demonstrate a skill or activity. You show what you are
talking about, you show by your own behavior.
Harvesting: here the mentor focuses on "picking the
ripe fruit": it is usually used to create awareness of what was learned by
experience and to draw conclusions. The key questions here are: "What have
you learned?", "How useful is it?".
No comments:
Post a Comment