Designing A Mentoring Job Description, Application and Contract

Defining a mentor job description and a mentor application seems so straight forward. Actually, to design an effective and strategic set of these requires us to become involved in a more complex area than may be first apparent. There are three aspects to working in this area:

1. The conceptual framework which guides your development process and then the use of several kinds of mentor statements.

2. Statements mentors might need to make BEFORE becoming a mentor, like . . .

3. Statements mentors might make which clarify the commitment they are making as they BECOME a mentor. Examples of these statements might be:

Before we can look at each of these four mentor statements (#’s 2 and 3), we need to discuss (#1) the conceptual relationships between effective mentor characteristics, roles, and tasks. Then we can use that framework to consider how best to design and use applications and any other statements we might ask mentors to make.

The first question we must answer is ”what are the relationships among the characteristics, roles, and tasks of effective mentors?” Here is a diagram that can help clarify these terms.

In actual practice, I find that the lists of “characteristics” of effective mentors which many programs develop are actually pretty useless because they intermix the “roles” and the “tasks” of effective mentors. Unfortunately, people use these two terms interchangeably when they actually mean different things.

ROLES describe what a mentor should BE or BE LIKE, and so are more subjective and abstract. This is what makes it so tricky and maybe useless when we use them for something like mentor selection, the frequent purpose of a mentor job description and application.

If the roles of effective mentors are used to develop a mentoring application that will help you select effective mentors, the selection process will become pretty subjective too. For example, one mentor role is that the mentor serves as a “friend”. My question is, “What mentor, on filling in an application, will state that they are not friendly?” How can I say whether you are or are not someone else’s friend? Yet truly, some mentors do not ACT like friends of their protege. This is why I feel roles are not too helpful. I do feel that all mentoring and induction programs need to define “The Roles of Ideal Mentors”. However, in order to make roles even more useful, such as for guiding decisions or mentoring behaviors, we also need to make those roles more concrete and observable by defining their equivalent TASKS. Doing so will make using them easier because they will be more specific and objective.

TASKS are those things which effective mentors must DO. They are observable behaviors and so it is much easier to be objective about whether they are present or not in any mentor. For example, the tasks that relate to the role of a friendly mentor might be stated as follows:

This is why, in my own mentor training materials, I present both the ideal roles and ideal tasks done by effective mentors. That way mentors and proteges can see the more abstract attitudes and dispositions behind the concrete ways which mentors behave. These Ideal Roles & Tasks lists are on my web site.

Before we can select some one’s application to use or we design our own, we must have clarified the characteristics or mentoring roles that we want our mentors to assume (to BE) and then have translated those roles into more tangible mentoring tasks (to DO). Once we have defined what we want to see mentors DO, then we can consider the application, contract, or other statement’s language to make them descriptive of those tangible behaviors.

Now we can turn our attention to the selection or development of effective mentor statements, such as applications and contracts. If you do not already have a “Characteristics of Effective Mentors” or other such page on which to build, you may need to review documents you can find from other programs to SELECT one that can meet your program’s needs. If you do already have such a document, you may need to revise it to make it a more effective description to guide mentor selection and matching by the program and the behaviors of the mentors once they are assigned.

A MENTOR JOB DESCRIPTION
A mentor application should at least contain a list of mentoring tasks, or it should be accompanied by the mentor tasks list. However, ideally a mentoring job description should contain BOTH a list of the ideal mentoring ROLES and the TASKS that effective mentors do. Be sure that these contain language that defines these roles and tasks as IDEALS toward which mentors should work. Also state that the best mentors are those who adapt what they do to fit the unique needs of their specific protege. That means:

What follows is a job description I found on the Internet. I provide it here to give readers the opportunity to use the ideas I have presented in this paper to evaluate an example job description for its usefulness and to consider whether it is focused on general roles (BE) or on specific tasks (DO), or both.

The Mentoring Program is provided through the selection of master veteran teachers for two years of release from their teaching duties to be full-time mentors for novice teachers.

A. Four and 1/2 days a week, each mentor orients and guides ten beginning teachers toward effective practice. Specifically, a mentor coaches novice teachers to:

Use collected data on the novice teacher's performance relative to the teaching standards to self assess and identify areas for improvement.
Study, analyze and learn in self-identified areas of growth

Mentor responsibilities also include planning, training, providing consultation and problem solving, demonstration teaching, collaborative instructional support, positive, non evaluative feedback, and emotional support.

B. The other 1/2 day each week is spent:

Working with and supporting fellow mentors's learning and growth
Working with the mentor program coordinator, who is the district “Mentor of Mentors”, to reflect on their mentoring and increase their own mentoring skills
Reading, studying, reflecting, and working on their own professional development to increase their skills and effectiveness as mentors.

Based on reading my ideas earlier in this article, would you think that I would like this job description?

If you concluded that I believe such a job description is a good one, you are right. It is specific and task-focused enough that a candidate could envision exactly what they must do as a mentor, yet it is not so specific as to be a “laundry list” that is overly prescriptive.

While this sample job description is a “good” one, the problem I find is that it does not ALSO help me decide as a mentor candidate if I am the kind of person that an effective mentor must be. If I am already a mentor, this job description does not ALSO help me self-assess whether I am demonstrating the kinds of attitudes I should to be an effective mentor. In other words, this sample job description is useful in that it is focused on the specific TASKS, but would be even more helpful to also define mentoring ROLES.

I suggest that mentors be asked to complete an application. Applications are an important opportunity for prompting mentor candidates’ reflection on the specific kinds of things that they will need to do and be when they become mentors. Such applications affirm that we don’t just want a bunch of mentors assigned. We want effective mentoring to happen, and we are clear about what effective mentoring looks like. If mentors can’t “see” themselves doing those specific things, then they should not become mentors.

Given these earlier statements, I bet you can guess how I feel about the approach of many mentoring programs that use applications which request information about the mentor candidate relative to the characteristics of effective mentors. Now you know that I find these only to work in theory and not in a practical sense.

Usually I encourage programs to first develop a job description for mentors which defines the basic roles and tasks mentors must perform, and then I suggest they need to develop the mentoring application to provide the information about how the mentor sees their ability to do what the job description includes.

For example, if the mentoring role requires a person who is a good listener, empathic, interested in the welfare of others, etc. then the application needs to ask something specific like, "Describe a situation in which you were involved with another adult and which demonstrates that you are a good listener, empathic, and that you promote the welfare of others."

The mentor application may also need certain additional items since the process and criteria for mentor selection often require certain qualifications. In such a case, the application should also ask the mentor candidate to provide certain information and even "certify" certain things, such as:

I would urge you to be careful not to make the application an essay test however. If there are some complex issues to include, there are at least two alternatives to asking a mentor candidate to write an essay about a topic.

1. Develop, field test, and then refine a limited set of questions that will reveal what you need to know without requiring extensive writing. For example, mentors must possess many qualities and be able to effectively promote the growth of another adult. This requires skills that are not often learned in a classroom with children. Uncovering a candidate’s abilities with other adults could become a very cumbersome process, and yet it is critical to a mentor’s success. Here is an example of a question that does reveal what is needed on this topic, but without requiring an extensive essay.

2. If such questions cannot be developed, or if the topic requires more than a brief written answer, or if interaction may be needed to answer the question or to clarify an answer, it's probably better that there be an interview instead, where true dialog and interaction can occur.

1. A “contract” is a document that formalizes what we agree to do, usually because it requires the signature by each of the parties to the agreement. Here are some suggestions for approaches:

2. Regarding the label “contract”, my preference is not to use the word “contract” within a mentoring program, unless it refers to the teacher’s contract. In other words, I would reserve that word to mean only one thing. A better term is “agreement”, in part because it is a different term with a meaning that will not be confused with another different document, and in part because it sounds less institutional and more relationship-based.

3. Rather than use a mentoring contract or agreement alone, I would suggest using a mentoring “Oath”. An oath is a promise and a sacred commitment. A “Mentoring Oath” can be defined to include all parties to the mentoring process by making the language general enough to apply to all the parties. The mentor and protege state the oath together as they must work together to each contribute to the growth of the other person, AND to ensure that they are an effective mentoring pair or team.

The mentor program leader also should take the oath and do so in front of the mentors and proteges. The oath applies to the coordinator since that person plays the role of Mentor of Mentors, and is responsible for the on-going training and support of the mentor. This suggests that the Mentor of Mentors should know and model the same mentoring roles and tasks and use the same mentoring strategies as do the new teacher mentors. How else would the mentors learn to be effective mentors, but through the example of the program leader(s)?

There is one other reason why I like the “oath” approach. Such an approach answers a question that few have every considered, the term “profession”. A profession is a highly complex career which requires considerable advanced preparation, uses a specialized vocabulary, involves complex behaviors requiring judgment and experience, and in which members assume understood moral, ethical, or service related responsibilities. Finally, a profession is usually "guarded" by its own members, meaning that joining the profession requires some process of selection and induction - a formal step is taken on assumption of duties. (Sounds like teaching, doesn't it?)

That understanding of the term suggests (and I agree) that mentoring is a “profession”. My question is, “If it is a profession, what do it’s members PROFESS?”

In other words, like other professions whose members take an oath, mentors need to clarify what they profess to be true, their ideals. I believe that teaching and mentoring should be based on such a profession of those ideals to which we aspire. Interesting idea, isn’t it? To write such an oath for mentoring would require some careful thinking about what ideals are and about the ideal roles and tasks toward which we agree to work.

If this idea appeals to you, consider the use of a “Mentoring Oath”. If your program has high expectations for the results of mentoring, defining and using documents such as mentoring job descriptions, agreements, and/or oaths will be an important way to clarify and focus on how to attain those expectations. Designing such documents is a complex but very critical and rewarding process. Its success may impact your entire program’s effectiveness because these documents set expectations for program participants.

I hope this paper has given you what you need to get started. Good luck with your program.