The Essential High Impact
Mentoring Strategy
© 2007, Barry Sweeny
The understanding and use of this essential strategy solves so
many problems and is so powerful in transforming practice, you simply
MUST grasp and use it if you want a high impact mentoring program
that delivers quicker results.
The Basic Premises
- We must receive the “gift” of effective mentoring
before we can effectively give it to others.
- When we receive a wonderful gift we feel we can not adequately
repay the giver for the gift, so we are only satisfied by passing
the gift on to others.
- We must understand why the gift we received was valuable to
us, so it will be just as valued when we give it to others.
- If we are the mentors, we will probably need a Mentor of Mentors
to do these things for us and then help us understand the process.
Application - The Essential Mentoring Strategy
- Provide a high impact mentoring experience to your protege.
Try to do so without explaining what you are doing or why. "Just
do it".
- Afterwards, use open-ended questions to guide the protege to
reflect on and analyze that experience & WHY it had a high
impact on them.
- Ask questions to prompt the protege to discover the parallel
instructional strategy to what was discovered in step 2.
- Facilitate the protege's planning for how to use that high
impact instructional strategy in his/her own teaching to improve
learning, performance and student achievement.
- Mentor and support the protege in using andmastering the teaching
strategy in their classroom.
To summarize, we are giving our protege a gift, helping them to
see how they can give their students that same gift, and supporting
them as they learn how to expertly give students such gifts. |
