The Role Of The Mentor

The Role of The Mentor
Mentoring is about one person providing help and support in a non-threatening way. The mentor acts as a guide, advisor, and mentor, empowering the mentee(s) to move forward with confidence to proving their competence. The teacher(s) serves a coach – observing on the side and intervening only when necessary. To be an effective mentor, one must:

Set the Norms
To maintain a healthy mentoring relationship, give some consideration to the following suggestions:

• Provide frequent and regular communication with mentees focused on content and the essential questions.
• Prepare for insightful and supportive communication.
• Fulfil promises within the time agreed.
• Guide and probe for more information, rather than being dictatorial.
• Maintain confidentiality; do not share others’ thoughts without the mentee's consent.
• Adhere to the rules for blogging etiquette as provided by your teacher.
  

Monitor the Discussion
After the mentee(s)’ initial post for each lesson has been posted on The To Kill A Mockingbird blog (http://mockingbirdproject.blogspot.com/), the mentor should respond in a timely manner and confine comments to the essential questions: The following are ways in which the mentor can reply to the mentee(s)’s post.

• Recognition
  Recognizing mentees consists in referring explicitly to their posts to assure them that their contribution is valued and welcome, or to correct misapprehensions on their part about the context of the discussion.
• Prompting
  Prompting mentees consists in requesting additional information to further the conversation or probe for deeper insight. Asking a question about the material or asking one mentee to comment on another’s ideas are forms of prompting.
• Referring
  The conversation may be enhanced by referring to content-related materials available on the Internet, for example, by hyperlinking, or offline materials.
• Meta-commenting
  Meta-comments are remarks directed at the context or norms of the posting; or at solving problems such as lack of clarity or irrelevance, and information overload.
  The role of the mentor plays an important role in essential to the vitality of any meaningful online discussion and engaging students in understanding To Kill A Mockingbird.

The role of the mentor plays an important role in essential to the vitality of any meaningful online discussion and engaging students in understanding To Kill A Mockingbird.