As a product of the education system myself, I have to be aware of the perception of what learning is that ‘the 15,000 hour apprenticeship’ of going through school has indeed left me with. Whilst I constantly seek to evade the top-down approach to teaching with my own students, I must admit that I myself gravitate to the masters and authorities ‘with the answers’ when it comes to learning something new. Perhaps the best example of this is when it comes to my last experience as a mentee, starting my teaching profession. I found myself attempting to emulate the style of my mentor/s as I lacked the confidence to believe that developing my own style was indeed what one needs to do. Learning of course, came out of this and now that I have a teaching mentee of my own I am acutely aware of the need to build an environment around the relationship whereby the mentee feels completely confident in taking what I have to say and filtering it through a lens of their own expectations, goals, experience, and perspective.
when I learned teaching I was happy to be a passenger in the car of the experienced driver, watching how they navigated obstacles and reacted to situations. The problem with that is, you are looking in the wrong direction, as learning to drive is about watching the road in front of you. But getting in the driver’s seat is only half the job, as when you’re in there you can either be comparing everything you do to that of the ‘master driver’ or you can be comparing everything you do to the driver that you yourself wish to become. And if you don’t know what that driver should look like yet, then that’s where the mentor comes in.
In the recent round of academic conferences we hosted as a College, I, as the Students’ Academic Mentor, made sure that the student did the thinking, the goal setting, and the communicating in our 3-way conversation (Parent/s - student - teacher). What is often the most useful thing I can do as an Academic Mentor is to simply hold up a mirror to the student and keep it there for a while. A challenge for me, perhaps, in going into a mentee role with my Google Innovator project is to remind myself that I do not necessarily need to look to the authority and experience that resides in my mentor for guidance. That I instead find the value in my own goals and the confidence in my own self-efficacy to see them realised. I am very much looking forward to starting my mentee journey to not only help see my Google Innovator project realised, but to learn about education, change, and mentoring itself. My mentor Angela Lee has an incredible wealth of knowledge and experience, but I hope that our relationship is one of synergy and not assimilation.