Mentoring Action Plan: Principles and Implementation
Defining Mentoring
Mentoring is a feature acquired through an individual’s personal relationship with another. It is a process where one person, typically more experienced, guides and supports another. This involves teaching, coaching, and facilitating the mentee’s integration into the learning process. Mentoring is done with the same intensity and in parallel with teaching. It is a process of school counseling, focusing on instructional processes but analyzing the whole context of the subject. The mentoring role extends to sectors affecting the school environment and other dimensions of the subject. Given the link between mentoring and guidance, it seeks the integration of personality.
Principles to Consider in Mentoring Action
- Constant Personal Effort Towards Self-Guidance: This is specified in each subject according to their characteristics, problems, and needs, aiming to achieve effective integration of the student’s personality.
- Guiding Action Should Be a Permanent Action: Aid moves in two directions, the non-management directors, and is intended to assist students in clarifying the stimuli that come from the medium and result in operational decision-making and benefits for the subject. This implies a relationship characterized by:
- Empathy: Based on acceptance of the other, mutual understanding, and emotional openness, providing a constant flow between the counselor and the counselee.
- Attitude of Respect: A fundamental pillar of action-oriented, respect for all decisions taken.
- Comprehensive Guidance: Addressing all facets of personality.
- Cooperative and Technical: It is cooperative because it needs all those involved in the instructional process (teachers, parents, students, other team members, and action-oriented tutorial that gives the scientific process) and converges technology because of various technical action sectors: educational, psychological, medical, etc. These must be linked, coordinated, and complemented.
- School Guidance Should Be Linked to the Educational Context: The guiding action should try to get the student involved in the educational process, which has ultimate responsibility with his family, school, and socio-cultural environment.
- Guiding Action is a Rational Action: Rational action is a process implying continuity and intensity. Continuity because the counseling act is done at all times. Intensity because, at certain times of the subject’s evolutionary development, more intense aid is indispensable.
Agents Involved in the Counseling Process
- The Guardian: The teacher, as responsible for the group of pupils, provides help and guidance. The Spanish education system fosters encounters between specialists and class teachers to achieve this.
- Tasks:
- Work in Groups: Understand the dynamics of the group-class, encourage the group’s life, deal with academic problems at the group level, analyze the group’s suggestions, coordinate and organize extracurricular activities, and provide technical advice on intellectual labor, academic, and professional information.
- Work with Each Student: Keep the student’s file up-to-date, provide knowledge and orientation (school performance, learning difficulties, social integration, choice of study or profession, etc.).
- Work with Teachers and Tutors: Coordinate evaluation sessions, establish information exchanges with other teachers, solve academic problems.
- Work with Parents: Collect all relevant information on the student and keep them informed of the student’s progress.
- Tasks:
- The Protected: The subject of the tutorial action described above. It is important to consider the physical, mental, and social behavior of students when implementing the tutorial.
Mentoring Action Plan
- Training and realization of the purposes of the tutorial action.
- These are:
- To provide each and every one of the activities carried out by the tutor to the student and the group.
- Family activities.
- Coordination of tutorial action with other tutors, teachers, psychoeducational teams, etc.
- Provide intervention actions in the evaluation sessions and control of the planning process to correct errors and make the tutorial action an ongoing process throughout the student’s academic itinerary.
Typical Procedure for the Preparation of Tutorial Action
- Objectives of the Tutorial:
- The primary objectives are to meet those set by the school, reflected in the specific educational project objectives. These are:
- Help students to be individuals according to the ideology of the educational community, family, school, and immediate environment in which they are immersed.
- Help students find their own goals.
- Enable students to know and understand and be able to choose a course of action.
- Enable the student’s ability to adapt successfully to various environments.
- Some things to recognize:
- Biological-Physical Map: Capabilities and limitations of the student’s body at the anatomical-physiological level.
- Psychological Plan: Data on IQ, aptitude, character, personality, interests, habits, etc.
- Academic Level: Academic performance, abilities, etc.
- Social Map: Subject’s adaptation to different areas, relationships with other children his age and with adults, etc.
- Family Plan: The subject’s relations with members of his family, the family’s expectations for the subject, the vision of the family center, the academic progress of their child, etc.
To collect all this data, one must resort to the use of various media and techniques such as:
- Tests
- Observation: Records of facts, checklists, etc.
- Questionnaires: The most suitable is the biographer.
- Interviews
- Sociometric Tests: They provide information regarding the relationship between the students with others and the situation of the group (sociology).