Thank you for those that responded to the call for new PGCert mentors for our 2017-18 cohort.

Mentoring is fundamental for developing the skills and confidence of our PGCert in Education Practice participants and we love to welcome those as mentors who are

• recognised as a good teacher;
• interested in new teaching and learning developments;
• willing to help others achieve their goals;
• open to the value of a wide variety of teaching approaches;

Mentors act as a critical friend / guide for the PGCert student. They need to be able to facilitate access to a range of development opportunities and conduct a formal teaching observation.

We had our first training event, run with Julia Calleja, from Organisational Development.

We ate (always a treat!), talked about what worked well and less well with mentoring on the PGCert.

The expectations of a mentoring relationship are negotiated between the mentor and student (or mentee). The key aspect is time to talk through pedagogical issues and have the opportunity for a teaching observation as this is required in the programme. The item that caused the most interest was what mentors actually do and don’t do ….

The bulk of the session was spent reviewing a variety of mentoring and coaching models. Here is a really useful clip of the GROW model in action from Dee Wilkinson (South West Coaching). Other models included four basic styles of helping, the Johari Window, the SMART and the CLEAR models. These are in the powerpoint (with notes from the session) which is part of the PGCert mentors resource pack. This pack contains PGCert mentor guidelines and paperwork our PGCert students use for the teaching observation. These resources are in a shared access drive in  I:\CEL\Public\PGCert & MA\Mentoring\Mentoring 2017-18

Once the panopto video is edited, we hope to share this too!

The list of PGCert mentors is an evolving list so please contact me if interested