- Mentoring
- What is Mentoring?
- Mentoring and Connected Learning
- Who can be a mentor?
- Mentoring Step-by-Step
- Step 1 - Create your mentoring roadmap
- Step 2 - Connect with mentors and mentees
- Step 3 - Guide mentors and mentees
- Step 4 - Ending the mentorship
- Troubleshooting Mentoring Challenges
- Mentoring Workbook
- Additional Mentoring Resources
Mentoring Step-by-Step
While mentoring relationships often happen organically, many libraries have developed programming with a focus on mentorship to reach certain goals. These goals might include supporting youth interested in STEM, reaching out to an underserved community, or providing youth with leadership and volunteer experience. In this section, we offer guidelines and prompts for designing a mentoring service to meet the needs of your library and your youth community. Follow this process through four steps:
- Step 1: Create your mentoring roadmap
- Step 2: Connect with mentors and mentees
- Step 3: Guide your mentors and mentees
- Step 4: Ending a mentoring relationship
As with almost every element of connected learning, this should not be a linear process! Once you have connected with your youth and mentors, you may wish to share your mentoring roadmap with them and make adjustments according to their feedback. Or you may find that after the mentoring has started, the participants’ goals change. You may move back and forth among the steps or work on two or more of them at the same time.