The specific principles which I see as applicable to mentorship are as
follows:
Love is the foundation to all healthy human relationships. The mentoring
relationship is first and foremost a human relationship, and will function
best if it is a relationship between whole persons built on love and
friendship.
Effective teaching in that context begins, not with the mentor talking,
but listening. There are at least three reasons for this:
Listening is valuable in and of itself.
When a person is listened to, it helps him to trust and open up. This
will help the teacher to gain a very important trust in instructing
the student.
It will give the mentor a basis to connect with the student, and
tailor messages to him.
Beauty is forged in the eye of the beholder. A willing student can be
powerfully shaped by a mentor who looks at him and sees him, not merely as
he is, but as he will become.
Effective mentoring is not only teaching of one specific area, but first
and foremost a teaching about life. It is teaching of life and wisdom in
such a way as to usually take the form of a kind of specific lesson.
The mentor should approach the relationship as being for the student's
benefit, and only incidentally for his own. He should be willing to do
things that are difficult for him, and he should be happy for the
student's success -- even (especially) when the student does better than
him, or catches him in error.
The mentor should not only be concerned with imparting knowledge, but more
importantly concerned with helping the student to think and use knowledge
effectively.
The mentor should not be trying to clone himself or make the student an
extension of himself. He should try to help the student be the person God
created him to be, not who the mentor wants to be or in fantasy would
selfishly like him to be.
The student should not be passive, regarding the mentorship as something
which is done to him. He should regard it as a resource to take advantage
of in his efforts to actively learn. He should take responsibility on
himself for his own progress. He should concentrate on actively
listening, and asking intelligent questions. The student should be like
Prometheus, looking for every opportunity to steal knowledge from his
teacher.
Both parties should work hard -- not asking "Can this work?", but "How
will we make this work?" Persistent in making things work, the mentor
should none the less vary his methods of explanation, like water flowing
down a hill -- it will get around obstacles, and it does so by flowing
around and through them, which is in turn accomplished by adapting its
shape to whatever there is, and thereby slipping around obstacles that
would stop a rolling rock.
[N.B. The following segment refers to the following joke/story, recounted in
Reader's Digest:
A professor believed that his students were mindlessly copying too much of his
lectures instead of thinking and then writing down key points. One day in
class, he interrupted his lecture and said, "Stop. I want you to put down your
pens and pencils and listen to me. You are not here to transcribe my lectures.
You are here to think first and foremost, and only then to write down the
essence of what I am saying. You don't have to write down every word I say
verbatim. Now, any questions?"
One student raised her hand. "Yes?" "How do you spell 'verbatim'?"]
A rare but important part of teaching is shattering limits on the way a
person is thinking ("How do you spell 'verbatim'?"). This should never be
done lightly or as a first approach, nor should it be done carelessly or
insensitively. It needs to be done with the utmost care, and is probably
very difficult to do well. That stated, a mentor does a student no
service by helping him to write down an hour's worth of requests to stop
writing and start thinking.
Metacognitive thought is important both for mentor and apprentice. The
mentor should be thinking about both his own thought and the student's,
and when the student isn't hearing what the mentor is saying, the mentor
should ask, "How am I thinking? How is he thinking? Why are we not
connecting?" -- but he should primarily be concerned for the student's
thought. The student should be thinking about both people's thought as
well -- the mentor's, because it is an example of how an expert thinks,
and his own, because if he understands how he is thinking he will be
better prepared to transcend his current limits. Both of them should
expect the other to periodically have an alien insight to share that won't
fit in their present mindsets.
The mentor should be emotionally intelligent, and be sensitive to the
emotions and emotional needs of the student. If the student is not in the
right emotional state, learning will be almost impossible. We are not
just pure, emotionless minds, and we can be far more effective if we care
for emotions and use them then if we act as if emotions were not a serious
part of us. If either person is not able to give full attention, a
meeting should be either shortened or postponed.
The mentor, precisely because he is a unique leader, should take the
attitude of a servant to the student, just as Jesus washed his disciples'
feet.
The mentor should realize that the lesson he is teaching is first, who he
is; second, what he does; third, what he says. The mentor should model an
excitement and interest in the material, and focus less on what to think
than how to think. He should also model before the student effective
human relationships with other people.
In the beginning especially, the mentor should not deluge the apprentice
with information. Assimilating new and foreign information --
particularly when you don't have a framework to put things into -- is
hard, and overloading a student prevents him from learning anything. A
mentor should begin by asking questions of the student, trying to
understand him better, and only slowly ease into talking about
philosophical frameworks and then details of the subject area of the
mentoring.
The mentor and eventually the student should know not only their cognitive
strengths, but at least as importantly their cognitive weaknesses -- both
those that are part of being human, and those that are specific to a
person. Code Complete (referenced below) says that there is a tenfold
productivity difference made when programmers use principles and
techniques grounded in a respect for cognitive weaknesses.
The mentor should be an expert in his field, and should also be continuing
to learn and do research. Graduation is not the end of learning, but a
beginning of a new kind of learning.
The mentor should help the student to put the day's lessons into practice.
The student should be asking the question, "How can I apply this? How can
I practice it?" Homework will help the student to learn, although perhaps
shouldn't be started until the mentor has earned the student's trust and
the student is motivated to use homework assignments to squeeze every last
benefit out of time with the mentor.
The student should be safe and free to make mistakes, for a couple of
reasons. First, if he isn't making at least some mistakes, he probably
isn't being challenged enough or learning enough new material. Second, a
mistake is a tremendous educational opportunity. It provides a unique
insight into the student's thought, and therefore should be treasured,
grasped, analyzed.
There is no quick fix. The most effective (and, for that matter, even the
fastest) way to get results is to work slowly, patiently, unhurriedly
towards achieving mastery. There is often a tradeoff between optimizing
for short term and long term effectiveness; patiently working for long
term payoffs will ultimately produce the highest dividends.
I will also mention several books which provide a backdrop to my comments,
three that I would strongly reccommend and four that I would suggest:
Strongly Reccommended:
The Bible. That has provided the theological and philosophical grounding
to my thought as a whole; it gives the structure/meta-structure which I
fit the other points into. (This is the most important, but it is not
necessary to read cover to cover before beginning anything. Fifteen or
thirty minutes a day will add up to a lot if continued for a couple
years.) Particularly relevant passages that come to mind are Matthew
5-7 (the Sermon on the Mount), I Cor. 13 (the hymn to love), much of
the Johannine writings (esp. John 13-17), and certain areas of
Proverbs.
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. A classic.
How to Win Friends and Influence People. Although much of the
influence it deals with is persuasive in character, the same principles
apply to the kind of influence necessary to effectively mentor.
Suggested:
Listening, A Practical Approach. Probably one among many books on
listening, this deals with an extremely valuable and neglected area of
communication.
Emotional Intelligence. We are not pure minds, and we can cripple
ourselves terribly if we do not handle our emotions effectively. If we
do, they will help us greatly.
Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction. In
computer science, most of the programming materials talk about how to
effectively use computers, taking advantage of their strengths and dealing
with their weaknesses, to get a computer to do something. This book talks
about how to effectively use your mind, taking advantage of its strengths
and dealing with its weaknesses, to get a computer to do something. The
kind of thinking involved is applicable far beyond computer science.
Gandhi's writings. I could mention specific chapters in what I've read,
but I will say that there is a general theme of spiritual force instead of
physical force, and the spiritual force which he advocates (which helped
him to turn bitter enemies into warm friends) has tremendous relevance to
mentorship. In Autobiographical Reflections, in a chapter entitled
"Ahimse or the way of nonviolence", he comments that when a parent slaps a
child, what affects the child is not so much the sting of the slap, as the
offended love which lies behind that slap.