Benefits for Mentees and Mentors

The mentoring experience benefits both the mentor and the mentee, as well as their library and school. Let's first look at how it benefits the mentee.

Potential Benefits to Mentees

As you thought about your mentors and how they contributed to your growth and development as a mentee, did any of the following benefits resonate with you?

• A safety net: Mentees counts on their mentors to help and guide them. There is less risk of making a mistake when a mentor is available to provide input and feedback.

• Less stress: Wasting precious time searching for answers, rethinking a plan, correcting mistakes, making mistakes - all of these create stress. These can be avoided with the help of a good mentor.

• Quicker learning: By sharing their experience and expertise, mentors help mentees avoid common pitfalls that slow down or derail learning. Mentors who have "been there and done that" are able to accelerate the learning process by assisting their mentees in identifying solutions and strategies.

• Elevated self-confidence: A mentor's guidance and support builds a mentee's confidence in their ability to complete a task. Their belief in the mentee's capability encourages a mentee to try things they might have not taken on previously.

• Increased competence: Competence (the ability to succeed at a task) and confidence (the belief that you have the ability to succeed at a task) are very much related when it comes to mentoring. They go hand in hand.

• Encouragement: A mentor supports and encourages a mentee's ideas, insights and project activities.

• Opportunity to test out new ideas: Mentors provide an ear and a sounding board for mentees. When mentees are able to clearly articulate their ideas, what they are working on is more likely to come to fruition.

• More strategies for being successful: Experienced mentors have learned appropriate "short cuts," productivity strategies and tips for good time management. Sharing this with a mentee inspires success.

• New skills: Mentors help mentees understand the skills they need to be successful and encourage them to learn those skills in the most efficient way possible. They offer feedback as the mentee goes about acquiring those skills.

• Effective role model: Mentors are role models. We mirror the actions, words, deeds of role models because we admire them. Mentors are often the "voice in our head" and their wisdom remains with us long after the relationship is over.

• A new relationship with a supportive adult: Mentor Benefits Few students have the chance to interact with an adult who is not their parent, friend, or teacher.

Charlotte Young, a Director and Co-Founder of The Girls' Network - a non-profit organization that matches underprivileged girls ages 14-19 years old with professional female mentors - gave a talk entitled "The transformation power of mentoring" at TEDxYouth. Click here to watch!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRk_ggwuLpw

Potential Benefits to Mentors

There are many ways in which mentors also benefit from the mentoring relationship. As you proceed to read through the list of potential benefits for you, the mentor, think about how these benefits are similar to or overlap with the potential benefits to your mentees.

• Personal satisfaction: This is what drives many mentors like you. It is the satisfaction from seeing a mentee develop and learn as a result of your mentoring.

• Opportunity to share wisdom: Mentoring provides a one-on-one opportunity to share your experience and wisdom with a student.

• Reaffirmation of your approach: When your mentoring experience has a positive impact on your mentee, it validates that your approach is working.

• Expanded generational and cultural perspectives: Every generation is different. And, every individual is unique. While you are helping your student learn, you are also acquiring strategies that enable you to be more effective communicating across differences.

• New ideas and insights: Your interaction with your mentee may spark a new idea or insight. The wisdom that comes from children is often amazing.

• Strengthening of your mentoring, leadership and interpersonal skills: Working with a young person in a mentoring relationship requires you to elevate your leadership skills, mentoring, and coaching. When you enter a mentoring relationship with a personal goal of growing your own competencies, it produces better results.

• A meaningful relationship: At the end of the day, mentors and mentees develop a meaningful relationship, and that in and of itself creates value.

Youth.gov provides a comprehensive list of the benefits that young people and mentors can experience through mentoring. Click the link below to check it out!

http://youth.gov/youth-topics/mentoring/benefits-mentoring-young-people.

Potential Benefits to Your Library and School

Mentor-librarians support and motivate young innovators' attitudes, thinking, and activities. But there are also ways in which the mentoring that occurs between mentor-librarians and young innovators also benefits their libraries and schools. Some of your mentor-librarian colleagues offered these ideas about how their new role was beneficial to their schools and libraries:

• Emphasizes the importance of the school librarian within the school community

• Provides mentee with a safe and nurturing environment to explore themselves creatively without fear of assessment

• Educates other teachers about the activities/lessons/resources that are available (leading to more teacher/librarian collaboration)

• Offers new role for the library – Mentoring is an opportunity for the library to provide a new and different role, and break away from its traditionally viewed services.

• Increases visibility of librarian and her library programs and services – In times of reduced budgets, being more visible in the community and in the lives of students, increases public awareness.

• Inspires other students to use the Library Makerspace and resources

• Allows me to participate in a community with other librarians to expand my own knowledge

• Provides an opportunity for a student or two in the school community to establish a relationship with a caring adult in the school. 

• Helps improve the student's sense of academic efficacy, belonging and possibly improve the student's attendance and behavior in school

Can you think of other ways in which being a mentor-librarian helps your library and school? If so, write them in the text box below.