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Mentoring: What is it?
Definitions of mentoring vary widely, as do individual youth mentoring programs and the types of relationships they promote (Smink, 1990). Broadly defined, however, mentoring is a sustained "one-to-one relationship between a caring adult and a child who needs support to achieve academic, career, social, or personal goals" (McPartland & Nettles, 1991, p. 568). Unlike "natural mentoring" relationships which may develop independently between students and teachers, older friends, relatives, or coaches, "planned mentoring" relationships are those in which a young person—the "mentee"—is matched with a mentor through a structured program with specific objectives and goals in mind (Floyd, 1993).
According to Floyd, planned mentoring programs can be broken down into three general types:
- Educational or academic mentoring focuses on improving students’ overall academic achievement. While these programs generally have specific school-related goals, such as raising students’ grades, improving attendance, or curbing dropout rates, mentors do not concentrate only on tutoring or doing homework with their mentees. Instead, some academic mentoring programs ask that mentors simply spend time encouraging, talking to, and becoming friends with their mentees, hoping to boost academic performance indirectly by improving students’ attitudes about school, raising personal goals, giving them incentives to attend regularly, etc.
- Career mentoring helps youth develop the skills needed to enter or continue on a career path. Career mentoring programs often pair students with adults who work in the students’ general field of interest, providing students with a role model who can familiarize them with the world of work and offer guidance and support as they prepare to make the transition from school to work or higher education.
- Personal development mentoring supports youth during times of personal or social stress and provides guidance for decisionmaking. While these programs may foster improved academic performance, they focus primarily on improving student self-esteem, behavior, and decisionmaking ability; reducing high risk behaviors such as gang involvement, premature sexual activity, criminal activity, and drug and alcohol abuse; and introducing students to social, cultural, and recreational activities they may not previously have experienced.
To be sure, academic, career, and personal development mentoring frequently overlap. Rather than focusing on any one type of mentoring, this booklet looks at school-based mentoring in general, acknowledging that schools may choose to combine elements of two or all three types as they work to address multiple issues and meet diverse school and student needs.
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© 2001
Date of Last Update: 09/19/2001
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