MENTORING AND ASSESSING A STUDENT

Mentoring and Assessing a Student

Mentoring and Assessing

Over hundreds of years of development, mentoring has become a widely accepted and growing approach used for different purposes in different contexts and in a variety of organizational endeavors such as business, education, and healthcare. A number of studies have investigated different types of mentoring applications in different settings and have provided useful insights about mentoring structure, the formation of relations between participants, individuals' roles, mentoring processes, successes and failures, and other factors.

While mentoring and coaching s students during their healthcare training or nursing courses, the mentor goes through the same stress of motivating and building good relationship with them. Be it nursing, or any other medical sector, it is necessary that the students are trained motivated and made to learn through various teaching skills and techniques. I recently mentored students and had a good opportunity to collaborate with him and guide him. This paper will present an account of my experiences along with the relevant literature on the mentoring and the relationship between a mentor and a student.

Mentoring and Assessment Students of Nursing

The idea of mentoring has been identified for centuries as method for maintaining culture, sharing knowledge, supporting talent, and securing future leadership (Darwin, 2000). Mentoring has been traced as far back as Homer's The Odyssey, in which a friend provided guidance to Odysseus' son in citizenship (Johnson & Nelson, 1999). I have been mentoring the students in the healthcare and nursing fields as guide, coach, sponsor, advisor, trainer, teacher, and role model and participate in encouraging, sharing, active listening, providing feedback, and guidance to enhance performance of the students. The relationship between mentor and students often focuses on the professional and career development and, as Johnson and Nelson (1999) stated, has sometimes been characterized as “a strong and sometimes intense personal relationship” (p. 192).

I have experienced mentoring the students and the relationship between them, I formed slowly over time, being complex and emotionally intense, and being of great value to the mentor, and those, often in the context of a long-term, emotionally bonded relationship. Mentoring can occur in both formal and informal relationships. Informal mentoring relationships have been found to have more consistent positive outcomes, especially for women and minorities (Gonzales, 2006).

While mentoring and coaching the students who are going through rigorous nursing courses, it is essential to understand their psychological and professional demands. Many students leave studying nursing during the first year of their course. They face frustrations, problems, and difficulties which they are unable to overcome. Thus, a mentor essentially gives them advice, suggestions, and lends them a hand of support to tackle their problems and worries.

Types of Mentoring

Traditionally mentoring has been defined as a relationship in which a wiser, older, more established individual contributes to the psychosocial development and status advancement of the mentee (Kram, 1985). Kram's (1980; 1983) seminal studies primarily focused on the long-term career development components of the mentoring phenomenon. Therefore, it is critical to recognize that much ...