It sounds almost like a student’s worst nightmare. One-on-one time with a teacher? A faculty member? Teachers looking for them? Thinking about them and singling them out? It’s enough for a person to Hope for a case of strep throat that will keep them out of school for a few days.
In reality, mentorship programs have a proven track record of producing success. Not only are they beneficial for the students, but they are also effective at improving retention and job satisfaction for the educators themselves.
In this article, we take a look at the benefits of faculty-led mentorship in education.
Contents
Who Are Mentorship Programs for?
Naturally, most schools do not have the bandwidth to pair every student with a faculty mentor. This begs the question: who are mentors for?
Many schools will need to approach it first from a need-based perspective. This means pairing students who are at risk of experiencing bad academic outcomes with mentors who are actively interested in helping them achieve better results.
Schools with adequate resources may also wish to expand their programs, accepting people based on their interest in participating.
The key is quality over quantity. If you can start small and achieve good results with high-risk students, you will not only attract more student participation, but you may also make more faculty members interested in becoming mentors.
Accountability
One of the primary benefits of mentorship programs is that they keep the students accountable. During the normal course of events, it is very easy for students to remain effectively anonymous. For students who feel disinclined to put their best effort forward, this anonymity makes it easier to continue producing subpar work.
If the student connects with their teacher they may feel more beholden to their expectations.
What’s more, they may simply feel more motivated to do better work for someone that they know and trust.
Mentorship programs can also be beneficial for students who are simply struggling with the materials. In these cases, they have more access to their teachers. They can ask questions and get individualized attention that may help them better engage with their schoolwork.
Mentorship programs are not a substitution for student effort, but they can help get everyone on the right track.
Relationships
Mentorship programs also have the potential to establish a valuable degree of trust between students and their teachers. These connections can be very meaningful, particularly when it comes to motivating students.
These relationships may also help teachers identify risk factors for their students. Academic outcomes are often a combination of internal ability and external factors that teachers are very rarely aware of or able to influence.
Mentorship programs cannot fix every aspect of the student’s personal life, but they can make teachers more sensitive to what is going on outside of school.
This awareness can go a long way toward strengthening connections and helping to develop more customized solutions for at-risk students.
Mentorship Programs May Keep Kids in School
Some students are more at risk when they spend time at home. After-school programs have a proven record of helping children in these situations complete homework assignments and, in certain situations, improve their personal safety.
Naturally spending an extra hour or so a week at school will not fully insulate someone from an unsafe home environment. However, every little bit helps.
Mentorship programs can also help students stay in school another way. Kids who enjoy the program and respond well to spending more time with their teachers may feel motivated to come to school on days when mentorship meetings take place. Similar effects are observed in sporting events and other extracurricular organizations.
While it may not sound like much, a little bit of extra motivation to make an enormous difference in the life of a child who is struggling to connect with their schoolwork.
Determining Participation
Sounds great, doesn’t it? But how do you get people involved? For one thing, you need to find a way to incentivize teachers. Obviously, for the most part, this will involve providing them with additional payment, possibly in the form of a stipend.
Your school will most likely have a compensation structure already in place for involvement in extracurricular activities.
You can further encourage participation by emphasizing the benefits of the program. Teachers genuinely want their students to succeed and will be more likely to participate in activities that contribute to that goal.
Incentivizing students is a slightly different matter. For high-risk students, you may wish to make participation compulsory.
If you would like to expand the program to include students who would benefit from it but do not strictly need it, emphasize ways that mentorship can be enjoyable. This might involve highlighting, success cases, or specifically designing the program to complement students’ interests.
Ideally, the program will be fun both for the teachers and for the students who are being mentored by them.
What Benefits Do Teachers Get?
They will get paid. We already mentioned that. But there is another incentive. Educators have an extremely high turnover rate. They feel unappreciated. Often it is hard for them to see that they are making a difference.
Mentorship programs can positively affect both issues. When teachers have the opportunity to work more closely with their students, it is easier for them to see the impact they are making on their lives.
They also have the opportunity to feel the appreciation that students have for them more acutely. For these exact reasons, mentorship programs across various professions have been shown to reduce turnover rate for those who participate, as well as upskill teachers without the need for an advanced education degree.
When properly executed, your faculty mentorship program can be an asset to the entire school.
