Daily archives: October 18, 2014

Mentoring Matters: A Practical Guide to Learning-Focused Relationships. Laura Lipton and Bruce Wellman. Mira Via, CT, USA.

This mentoring guide has been used effectively to support mentoring skills and development in many programs throughout British Columbia. It is an excellent resource for introducing and working with the skills of a learning-focused relationship. It has an informative section on defining the mentor’s role through consulting, collaborating, and coaching, and provides in depth scaffolds for development of learning –focused verbal tools to create emotional safety and produce complex thinking. This guide is cognitively focused and articulates the developmental differences between beginning and ‘expert’ teachers.

Creating a Mentoring Culture: The Organization’s Guide. Lois J. Zachary, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2012

This guide provides a comprehensive roadmap for organizations wanting to create a mentoring culture. It also provides useful tools for analyzing existing mentoring efforts. The stories and examples are taken from different types of corporate and non-profit organizations, but offers concrete ways to expand and align processes that lead to stronger mentoring practices within educational settings. The book provides numerous tools for districts just getting started with mentorship or seeking renewal of an existing program. This is an excellent resource for thinking about mentoring from a broad and deep strategic perspective.

The Mentor’s Guide: Facilitating Effective Learning Relationships (second Edition). Lois J. Zachary, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2012

This book is a great guide for mentoring practice, full of practical tools for facilitating the experience through all the phases of the mentoring cycle. The work is grounded in the principles of adult learning, and offers numerous examples and scenarios of what mentoring can look like and sound like in different contexts, including how to address challenges that arise. The book is not written specifically for the education system, but nonetheless has been widely used to guide mentors in school settings. Lois Zachary is an internationally recognized expert on mentoring, and was the key speaker at the 2014 Mentor Conference in Richmond.