Mentoring Students and Young People

A Handbook of Effective Practice

Andrew Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9781138145962
• eBook ISBN: 9781135727178
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Mentoring is used in a wide range of situations in education: to assist learning; to help weaker students or those with specific learning needs or difficulties; to develop community or business links; to aid the inclusion of pupils otherwise at risk of exclusion; to develop ethnic links; to enable students to benefit from the support of their peers, to name but a few. The development and proliferation of mentoring and mentoring schemes in education over the last few years has been dramatic, and presents teachers, school managers and leaders, as well as mentors themselves with a challenge. This book presents all mentors plus anyone working with young people with an invaluable guide to approaches to mentoring today. It looks at mentoring as a concept, at what mentoring is, how it is done well and how it can be made more effective. Written by a leading expert on mentoring, this practical and relevant handbook is backed up throughout by inspiring and relevant case studies and examples from schools and schemes internationally.

Part I
Understanding mentoring

1
The context of mentoring

INTRODUCTION

We begin at the turn of the twentieth century in North America with an account of the modern origins of mentoring programmes. This leads into a description of the development of student mentoring internationally. Mentoring programmes have developed widely across the Englishspeaking world and the chapter provides a brief overview of mentoring in the United States, England, Australia and Canada. However, there are notable examples of student mentoring in Israel and in Europe. The next section examines the development of government policy towards mentoring for young people, using the experience of England in the past ten years as an example. It includes an account of the role of the National Mentoring Network and an extended case study on the role of learning mentors. The chapter ends with some broad conclusions on the role of government and the international spread of mentoring programmes for young people.

ORIGIN OF MODERN MENTORING PROGRAMMES

The most illuminating account of the modern development of the mentoring movement in America can be found in Marc Freedman’s book, The Kindness of Strangers (Freedman, 1992). The so-called ‘third wave’ of mentoring developed rapidly in the 1980s and early 1990s as the administrations, first of Ronald Reagan, and then of George Bush, turned to voluntarism, rather than federal action, as a vehicle to address deep-seated social problems. The current wave of mentoring is a particular form of voluntarism, one focusing on the poor, primarily involving middle-class volunteers and promoting personal relationships as an instrument for helping the disadvantaged’ (Freedman, 1992:2).

This was, however, the latest manifestation of a recurring phenomenon in American society. During the economic depression of the later 19th century a social reform movement began. It was based upon a network of charitable societies with paid male agents supporting female ‘friendlyvisitors’. Friendly visitors were middle-class evangelists who aimed to serve as role models for the children of the poor, and to dispense sympathy and wise advice. Philip (2000) comments on the irony of middle-class women, whose own children were being cared for by servants, attempting to rescue children of the poor from following their parents’ example. The intrinsic difficulty of the task, the overwhelming nature of the economic hardship and poverty, and a shortage of volunteers led to the demise of the Friendly Visitor movement and their eventual replacement with social workers (Lubove, 1965).

Big Brothers/Big Sisters

The first mentoring programme, Big Brothers/Big Sisters emerged at the beginning of the 20th century in New York (Beiswinger, 1985). Ernest K Coulter served in the first Children’s Court in New York, where he felt that the lack of concern shown for the children in sending them to the harsh reformatory school contributed significantly to high rates of recidivism. In an address to civic leaders, middle-class businessmen and professionals, he discussed the plight of one young offender.

There is only one possible way to save that youngster, and that is to have some earnest, true man volunteer to be his big brother, to look after him, help him do right, make the little chap feel that there is at least one human being in this great city who takes a personal interest in him; who cares whether he lives or dies.

(Freedman,1992:8)

Coulter ended his speech with a call for volunteers to join his personal crusade. That night the first 39 big brothers were recruited. The Big Brothers movement caught on and in April 1916 a rally at the Casino Theatre in New York attracted an audience of 2,000 people, both black and white, and from all denominations. As with the earlier Friendly Visiting movement, Big Brothers/Big Sisters was driven by the desire to prevent social breakdown through socializing, guiding and building personal relationships. In 1921 the Big Brother/Big Sister Federation was founded, and established the first ground rules for one-to-one relationships. The movement evolved into Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America, probably the largest mentoring programme in the world today (see Chapter 13 for evaluation findings).

THE UNITED STATES

The current mentoring movement within education in the United States was sparked by an upsurge of interest in an ‘instrumental’ concept of mentoring within the corporate world (Freedman, 1992:14–16). During the 1970s, what Freedman calls the ‘second wave’ of mentoring was viewed as an effective way to boost the achievement of women in corporations, in order to help them to break through the ‘glass ceiling’. This movement spawned its own industry of ‘how to’ manuals, seminars and corporate schemes. Eventually the goals of corporate mentoring programmes were widened to include employees from minorities.

Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America was the original mentoring programme for young people. Other programmes grew up to address some of the perceived limitations of Big Brothers/Big Sisters, which:

• targeted the under-10s for the start of the programme;
• focused on one-parent families;
• had a lengthy recruitment and training process for mentors.

The third wave of mentoring spread rapidly across the United States in the late 1980s as a tool to help disadvantaged and at-risk children and young people. The 1983 report, A Nation At Risk, produced by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, recommended collabo ration between schools, corporations and universities to provide mentors for youth (Guetzlow, 1997). Mentoring increasingly gained high profile and influential backers, including many leading politicians. Milestones of the third wave included:

• 1989: President Bush endorsed mentoring in a television commercial.
• 1989: New York’s First Lady, Mathilda Cuomo, declared 1989 The Year of the Mentor’.
• 1990: several large corporations and national organizations, such as the United Way of America and the National Education Association, announced their support for mentoring.
• 1990: the First National Mentoring Conference was held with Elizabeth Dole, Secretary of Labor, giving the keynote address and federal endorsement.
• 1994: The Office of Juvenile Justice launched the Juvenile Mentoring Program (see Case Study 6.3)
• 1997: at the Presidents’ Summit for America’s Future it was announced that every child in America should have access to ‘an ongoing relationship with a caring adult mentor, tutor, or coach’ (Lauland, 1998).
• 1998: Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs received large-scale federal funding to encourage children from low-income homes to go to college (see Chapter 9).
• 2001: President George W Bush backed a big expansion of Big Brothers/Big Sisters working with four leading service organizations.

The Presidents’ Summit of 1997 was important as it made having a mentor a cornerstone of the nation’s approach to tackling young people’s problems through active citizenship and volunteering. In 1996, it was estimated that between 5 and 15 million of the nation’s youth would benefit from a caring adult mentor (Lauland, 1998). The Presidents’ Summit established the America’s Promise organization chaired by General Colin Powell, which stimulated Communities of Promise across America to meet the five promises set out in the Presidents’ vision. The fact that it included both Republican and Democratic Presidents heralded continuing bipartisan support for mentoring. This translated into many pledges, such as that of the Governor of California that there would be a further 250,000 mentoring relationships across the state during the next few years.

Mass mentoring

Freedman divides US mentoring programmes into large national programmes, small-scale local programmes and corporate programmes (see Case Study 3.3). In addition to organizations running mentoring programmes, there are also mentoring support organizations at national, state and local level. By 1992, the youth mentoring field was described as being in a ‘start-up phase’, ‘highly decentralised and extraordinarily diverse’ (Freedman, 1992:27).

Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America has grown dramatically in the past few years. In 1992, there were 483 local affiliates in 49 states involving 60, 000 young people with ‘Bigs’ and a further 40,000 on the waiting list. It is a good example of what has been referred to as ‘mass mentoring’ (Withers and Batten, 1995). The 1997 Presidents’ Summit led to a pledge to boost the number of mentees to 200,000 by the year 2000. A similar massmentoring programme is Campus Compact, which has a goal of a million college and high school students to act as mentors for at-risk children in grades 4 to 9. President George W Bush showed his support for mentoring, which began when he was Governor of Texas (see pp 206–07), by announcing a partnership between Big Brothers/Big Sisters and four leading service organizations: the Kiwanis, Lions, Optimist and Rotary International (Philadelphia, 2 July 2001). The aim was to recruit a million mentors over five years to support the estimated 14 million at-risk young people across the United States.

Another example of mass mentoring supported by the Federal Government came during the Clinton-Gore administrations. Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEARUP) was expanded to help 750,000 low-income, middle-school children complete their schooling and prepare for college (see Case Study 9.3). Federal GEARUP funding aimed to bolster mentoring efforts among states and to provide new grants to partnerships involving middle schools, higher education institutions, private companies and community organizations. The 2001 budget sought to expand services to 1.4 million students, a 63 per cent increase on the previous year. The programmes were distinctive in being:

• based on solid educational research;
• extremely well funded;
• a catalyst for establishing extensive local and state-wide partnerships;
• responsible for a wide range of activities to raise achievement in schools, with mentoring as a key component.

Factors behind growth

Freedman attributes the popularity of mentoring in America to three main factors (1992). The first was the focus in the media on the increasing isolation of young people from caring adult attention, which was deemed responsible for the lack of opportunity, exclusion (see Chapter 6) and poor quality of life for young people, and potentially serious problems of crime and disorder for society. The second factor was the trend towards volunteering and charitable giving among a section of the socially concerned middle class, particularly those ‘baby boomers’ whose formative years had been around the 1960s. It may also be true that many people reacted to the widening gulf between rich and poor during the 1980s. A third factor was the need identified by psychologists for middleaged adults to want to transfer their knowledge and culture to the young through direct contact (Goleman, 1990). Mentoring has emerged as an excellent vehicle for ‘matching spirit with need’ (Freedman, 1992:33).

According to Freedman the popularity of mentoring also rests in several properties. Mentoring is:

• Simple: complex social issues can be tackled by focusing on the needs of an individual.
• Direct: mentoring enables an adult to give direct help to a young person in order to make a difference to their lives.
• Cheap: mentoring is a low-cost alternative to expensive government programmes and to the work of public institutions.
• Sympathetic: to be called a mentor is a kind of honour that links to a noble tradition.
• Legitimate: it is recognized as a proper role for unconnected adults to play in the lives of young people.
• Flexible: in that it can be used for a range of purposes and appeals to all shades of political opinion.

Mentoring has managed to avoid the controversy that has sometimes embroiled the volunteering movement. However, there was a risk in the early 1990s of its effectiveness being over-hyped. According to Freedman (1992), the evidence of overall impact was ‘modest’ amid the anecdotal claims of success which have characterized the movement. Indeed, he warned the mentoring movement of the dangers that fervour without a supporting infrastructure could lead to more harm than good being done for young people.

CANADA

An upsurge of interest in mentoring in Canada also occurred during the 1990s, according to the Peer Resources Network (Carr, 2001). The Peer Resources Network is a Web-based organization that provides information on mentoring and tutoring, and has the most extensive mentoring database in North America. The database lists 7,500 peer and mentor programmes around the world, with around 5,200 programmes and individuals in Canada, most of them managed by educational or not-forprofit organizations. Carr argues that, from the data available, Canada is a world leader in the per capita percentage of people involved in tutoring and mentoring. Case Study 1.1, Big Brothers and Sisters of Canada, illustrates the spread of mentoring programmes and models internationally. The case study also shows the diversity of mentoring practice and programmes in a mature mentoring organization and culture.

CASE STUDY 1.1
BIG BROTHERS AND SISTERS OF CANADA

Big Brothers and Sisters of Canada is the Canadian version of Big Brothers/ Big Sisters of America. The Burlington, Ontario, office manages the mainstream mentoring programmes for children and youth. However, it also acts as a catalyst for local agencies to develop innovative programmes. Mentorship activities include:

• Mobilising Community Partners: where a student spends three to four hours once a week at the workplace of his or her mentor.
• Terra Buddy Program: where young women with children or who are pregnant are paired with an adult volunteer who provides friendship and support.
• Roots and Wings: where ‘at-risk’ families are matched with adult mentors who provide guidance, support, and friendship to the whole family.
• Life Choices: where girls learn about life choices during weekly group meetings with adult volunteers.
• Right for Me: where boys facing difficulties during adolescence meet in groups with adult volunteers.
• In-school Mentoring: where an adult mentor works with four student mentors, who in turn are matched one-on-one with younger students.

A recent Peer Resources telephone survey of the 2,000 corporations listed as the most productive by the Canadian Business Magazine investigated their involvement in mentoring. A third had structured mentoring programmes. One in ten reported that their employees worked as volunteer mentors, typically working with local young people.

A Canadian example of a mass-mentoring programme is the influential Stay-in-School Initiative that was launched in 1992 to tackle the problem of the rising drop-out rate from high schools across the country. The Initiative included various elements:

• a training-the-trainers in mentoring and peer-assistance campaign;
• consultancy for community and school-based mentoring and tutoring programmes;
• dissemination of services to support mentoring and peer assistance across Canada.

From the initial training of 30 National Mentor Leaders in Victoria in 1992 until the end of the Initiative in 1995, more than 65,000 mentors were recruited and 130,000 students were matched with mentors (3 per cent of the youth population aged 14–25). The national school drop-out rate has shown a steady decline since the introduction of the Initiative. A glance at the Peer Resources Web site shows that all forms of mentoring for students and young people continue to thrive in Canada.

ISRAEL

Israel provides a very different experience from the diversity of programmes to be found in North America. One of the main issues in the Israeli education system is achieving equality of opportunity and reducing gaps in achievement from such a diverse population. Since 1975, the Perach project has involved university students working as tutors and mentors with school students. Perach means ‘flower’ in Hebrew, but it is an acronym for a ‘tutoring project’. The Perach project was a compromise outcome of a strike by 150,000 university students protesting at the high costs of tuition (Carmeli, 1999). The idea was to award students scholarships to cover around half their tuition costs in return for them spending a few hours each week helping and motivating disadvantaged Jewish and Arab children.

The number of university students involved in the project has steadily risen and in 2001 it stood at over 25,000 student-mentors (20 per cent of all higher education students) working with over 50,000 children in 800 schools. Typically around twice as many students apply to join Perach as there are places available (Carmeli, 1999). The head office of Perach is the Weizmann Institute of Science and there are eight regional offices located in the universities, with around 500 staff to supervi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of case studies
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of abbreviations
• Ages and stages of education in the US, Canada, UK and Australia
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Understanding mentoring
• Part II The forms of mentoring
• Part III Guide to effective mentoring
• Part IV Conclusion
• Glossary of mentoring terms
• Web guide
• References