MENTORSHIP AND LEARNING PORTFOLIO
What is Mentorship to Me?
The basic definition of mentorship is a relationship where one person passes along experience, knowledge, and connections to another person. In this relationship, there is usually someone of senior status being the mentor, and someone of junior level being the mentee.
To me, mentorship is a journey that a person to takes to connect and relate to others who may need or want more support in specific domains. Most definitions of mentorship focus on the benefits that the mentees receive, but I believe there are equal benefits for the mentor as well.
My mentorship is affected by my own learning style and intelligences, as well as trying to integrate different ways of learning into my breakouts.
Learning Style and Intelligences; How it effected my Mentorship
One of the most challenging parts of mentorship, especially in the way that it was done in GART 4000, was figuring out how to best approach your mentees. Every week there was new material to learn, and doing the same thing can be repetitive. For the first couple of breakouts, I played to the learning styles of auditory, visual, and tactile learning by showing videos, making mind maps, doing hands-on activities, and more with my mentees. These are my top intelligences, and I thought to get comfortable with my breakouts it would be useful to do something that i am comfortable with. I also incorporated a lot of small group work with my mentees to help them to get to know each other more. I learned through my trial that my mentees appreciated the visual and tactile portions of breakouts because it gave them a different way of learning the material. They received auditory and reading/writing ways of learning when they took notes on the lectures and listened in class, but the breakouts became a way for my mentees to add a different understanding using activities that are not a usual part of a first-year undergraduate student's daily study routine.
I also used my interpersonal and linguistic intelligence to help me to make connections with my mentees, and use my linguistic intelligence to explain complicated topics in the chapters.
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Overall, knowing my learning styles and intelligences was essential to helping my mentees succeed.
What Do My Mentees Think?
"I have a fun time!"
"You slay"
“You are awesome! Thank you!”