The
Developmental Mentoring Continuum
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INDEX:
A Framework
That Illustrates the Sequence of Mentoring Applications Across Age
and Career Levels
There are so many applications for mentoring! We
use mentoring strategies to guide and assist at-risk youth, newly
hired employees, managers, higher education students, all kinds
of people in every imaginable walk of life, position, and kind of
organization. There are so many applications that we may not see
the consistant, simple, sequential flow of mentoring through life
and careers.
The Developmental Mentoring Continuum is a framework
which was developed to illustrate that sequence of mentoring applications
across age and career levels.
The Basic "Unit"
within the Developmental Mentoring Continuum is one person who is
both:
- A Protege, learning from a mentor, and...
- A Mentor, sharing what they know with
others.
The adjacent figure illustrates this basic "unit"
as the oval labelled "Me".
The M stands for the role the person plays as a
Mentor, and the P represents this same person's role as a Protege,
when the person works with his/her own mentor. The arrows show how
the mentoring relationships of this one person link to other persons.
The Basic Concept Next,
each of those persons' relationships extend to working as a protege
and as a mentor with still other persons, repeating the basic unit
over and over again. The essential concept behind this is, "Everyone
IS a mentor, and is BEING mentored." We are all continually
learning and supporting others' learning. For example, a second
year teacher may be working with a mentor a a protege and, at the
same time, working informally or as part of a team to support a
first year teacher. That first year teacher may see ways to also
serve as an informal mentor in supporting a student teacher in the
same school.
The Developmental
Mentoring Continuum 
The Continuum illustrates how each persons' relationships
extend to working as a protege and as a mentor with still other
persons, repeating the basic unit over and over again. Across this
Continuum the content of the dialogue changes depending
of the goals, but the mentoring strategies
remain the same.
The Continuum shows skill, career and leadership development at
an adult level, such as occurs in oneÕs career, but these goals
also are part of earlier youth and student mentoring levels as well.
As one person grows and moves through the Continuum, they may benefit
from many separate, unrelated, informal mentoring experiences and
formal mentoring programs. Even within one program, the goals of
mentoring change, there is overlap in each relationship, and so
the same activities are used to serve more than one goal.
How Mentoring Starts &
How It Grows
Often, when a new mentoring program starts, it is within one
organization and the program focus is on just one or two
of these developmental levels, depending on their perception of
unmet needs. Eventually, as the organization comes to value what
mentoring contributes at those levels, other unmet developmental
needs and additional goals may be adopted. Then mentoring is used
across the levels of experience in staff and the hierarchy
of roles, eventually expanded to build the capacity of all.
Sometimes the mentoring even extends beyond the limits of the
organization:
- Because the PEOPLE want to Ògive backÓ the mentoring
ÒgiftÓ that they feel they have received as proteges. An example
is an employee who is mentored at work and who decides to tutor
a student outside of work time.
- Because the ORGANIZATION wants to develop those
on whom the organizationÕs future success depends. An example
of this is a university education program that assigns Junior
Block teacher education students to tutor at-risk students in
local area high schools, and to help those seniors see themselves
as having the potential to succeed at the university level.
The essential concept behind it all is, "Each
person IS a mentor, and is BEING mentored." All are continually
learning and supporting others' learning. |
