Have you got a match?
Featured in the Continuing Professional Development training manual
By Sandy McMillan
Category: Personal Development
Credit price: 3 download credits (Single user)
One of the aims of the learning activities is to help people set up mutual mentoring pairs so that they can continue to support one another’s CPD after the formal activities have finished. People have different expectations from their mentors, and also have different preferences for how they will behave when mentoring. This training activity aims to establish mutually compatible mentoring pairs.
With the aim of matching pairs of mutual mentors that will work well, everyone in the learning group completes two forms. The first offers people six main mentoring styles and asks them to choose how they would prefer their mentor to behave in future. The second asks people to consider the same six styles and choose how they would prefer to behave when being a mentor. These preferences are collected on to an OHT and shown to participants. People then record on a third form, in order of preference, the three people in the group that they would be prepared to work with in a mutual mentoring. This allows them to take account of personal feelings about members of the group. You then collect these forms and use them to put people into the most suitable pairs, later showing these pairs on a sheet of flipchart paper and getting people’s agreement to them. People work in these pairs from then on, both during the learning activities and afterwards.
Who is it for: This training activity is intended for use by trainers to set up supportive relationships between the participants by matching what people want to get from being mentored with the style they want to adopt as mentors. This tactic has a good record of producing mutually supportive pairs of people who continue to help one another long after the learning event has ended.
| Resource Type: | Activity |
| Min Group Size: | 2 |
| Max Group Size: | 12 |
| Typical Duration: | 01:00:00 |
| No of Pages: | 13 |
Resources: View standard resources for Fenman training activities
Purpose: This is a ‘stand-alone’ training activity which can be used to set up compatible pairs of mutual mentors in many different circumstances. It may be run at almost any stage of a series of learning activities, though it works best when people have had some chance to get to know one another. Since you need 15 minutes to work privately on some data collected from the group, it is convenient to schedule this training activity just before a break.
Download the training activity, Have you got a match? as featured in the Fenman training manual; Continuing Professional Development