Exploring the Benefits of Mentoring to the Mentor
The benefits of mentorship to a new ECE professional are many and easy to understand. What may be less obvious is the professional development value of mentoring to the more seasoned educator. This article explores some of the upside of mentoring to the mentor that you may not have considered. These benefits make it clear that mentoring practices withing ECE programs are a win-win-win: benefiting new educators, experienced ECE teachers, and administrators alike.
According to Indeed, mentors in professional guidance relationships gain the following skills and benefits:
- Mentoring builds leadership skills. Those skills are valuable in the classroom, when dealing with families, and can lead to career advancement as well.
- Mentors learn new practical skills. While there is an adage that says “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” – it’s simply not true. While seasoned educators have a wealth of knowledge to share on successful strategies for inside and outside of the classroom, they also benefit from learning about a fresh approach as seen through a new pair of eyes.
- Mentors experience growth in interpersonal skills. This is particularly true for ECE educators who spend a high percentage of their time dealing with young children. Serving as a mentor offers the opportunity to guide and interact with other adults on a deeper level than what is available at monthly staff meetings.
- Mentoring leads to greater reflective practices. Other articles in this newsletter examine various aspects of reflective practices, but mentors are in a unique position to reflect on their own experiences and strategies as they strive to pass their knowledge and guidance to a colleague. Being able to teach what you do successfully forces greater understanding of the how and why of the success of those practices.
- Mentoring leads to networking opportunities. Building the kind of trusting relationship with a new colleague that results from mentorship means making a connection that is more likely to endure than one with a simple colleague. That relationship can lead to more connections in the field that a mentor can tap in the future for any number of needs, such as:
- Seeking support for community wide initiatives to benefit the industry.
- Looking for new professional opportunities.
- Needing expert knowledge in an area of practice with which the mentor is less familiar.
Clearly, mentoring programs are not just good for new and inexperienced ECE professionals. Acting as a mentor is good for the professional development of experienced teachers as well. And the benefits derived by both mentee and mentor allow them both to better guide and facilitate the growth and learning of students and their families, which serves to strengthen the ECE center as a whole.
For the main article Building Bridges: Professional Growth Through Mentorship and Reflective Practices, CLICK HERE
For the article The Practice and Value of Mentorship in Early Childhood Education, CLICK HERE
For the article An Introduction to Reflective Practices, CLICK HERE
For the article Exploring Cooperative Reflective Practices in the Early Childhood Education Setting, CLICK HERE