{"id":413,"date":"2019-06-26T15:45:38","date_gmt":"2019-06-26T22:45:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0053\/?p=413"},"modified":"2019-07-06T08:17:10","modified_gmt":"2019-07-06T15:17:10","slug":"creating-effective-mentorship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0053\/creating-effective-mentorship\/","title":{"rendered":"Creating Effective Mentorship"},"content":{"rendered":"
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PIXABAY (2015)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Engaging in a design process for a digital tool that could resolve a challenge at my current place of work, a post secondary institution, framed the beginning of LRNT 527. The challenge started with the crafting of a design question and this caused me to reflect on a mentorship training session that was created by my team in answer to a widening gap of quality between field settings for our students. The importance of mentorship for student success was initially inspired through \u201cSecondary Research\u201d (IDEO., 2015) and the article by Laura Doan \u201cMentoring: A Strategy to Support Novice Early Childhood Educators\u201d. The resulting two hour face to face session was made mandatory for all field settings if they were to receive students. The training has since been presented at conferences and we are in our second year of rolling it out. Our feedback from the field was very supportive and participation in the training session created a good start for students. However, because mentors are not asked to retake the training every year we have since noticed that in some placements the quality of support has started to deteriorate again. A one time approach is not creating the consistency in practice we were hoping for and because access to training events in a rural area is always a barrier, the following design question emerged: \u2018How might I create an approach for mentorship training that will increase the quality of practicum experiences for students and support mentors throughout the duration of the practicum?\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

In order to engage in a human centred design approach IDEO. (2015)\u00a0 offers a selection of methods to create an empathetic process to enlist user feedback. As I had already engaged in several methods introduced in the IDEO design kit, such as Secondary Research, Peers Observing Peers, Define Your Audience and Immersion. For this engagement I chose the \u2018Extremes and Mainstreams\u2019 method and decided to create a questionnaire, using Monkey Survey, and send it out to three former mentors. I made sure I selected participants ranging from different sized settings (private and public) and a range of skill levels. In my selection, I made sure to consider the different barriers each mentor may encounter using my digital tool from finding the time, technical ability, to working in isolation, even in this small selected group of users I was able to create variety. The challenge I anticipate is that summer is upon us and people are either on vacation or just not checking their emails as often. I would have liked to engage in person to person interviews but my rural and remote location makes that very difficult. Now that I have my design challenge and my questionnaire has been sent out to future users, I can\u2019t wait to see where this will take me.<\/span><\/p>\n

References<\/span><\/p>\n

Doan, L. (2013). <\/span>Mentoring: A Strategy to Support Novice Early Childhood Educators. Retrieved from <\/span>https:\/\/journals.uvic.ca\/index.php\/jcs\/article\/view\/15447\/6148<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Hain, J. (2015). Parenting Friendship Nurturing Loving Psychology [Digital Image]. Retrieved from <\/span>https:\/\/pixabay.com\/illustrations\/parenting-friendship-nurturing-736384\/<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

IDEO. (2015). <\/span>D<\/i>esign Kit \u2013 Methods<\/i>.Retrieved from http:\/\/www.designkit.org\/methods<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Engaging in a design process for a digital tool that could resolve a challenge at my current place of work, a post secondary institution, framed the beginning of LRNT 527. The challenge started with the crafting of a design question and this caused me to reflect on a mentorship training session that was created by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":95,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lrnt527"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0053\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0053\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0053\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0053\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/95"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0053\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0053\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":425,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0053\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413\/revisions\/425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0053\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0053\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0053\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}