Course Objective
To examine different models of reflective practice and explore how they can be used to continuously improve the quality of mentoring programmes.
Learning Outcomes
- Describe common traits of high performing mentors
- Explain key benefits of using reflective practice
- Apply Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle and Brookfield’s Four Lenses to a mentoring context
- Include Kolb’s model for experiential learning within mentoring programmes
- Outline what type of feedback is required at each stage of the mentoring process
- Evaluate useful sources of information that can be used to enhance reflective practice
- Review the benefits of establishing a community of practice to help inform reflective practice
Introduction
During the course, you are going to play the role of Amina who is about to start her mentoring journey. A casual reference to reflective practice by her manager leads to the small project growing in scale and involving colleagues from all departments within the organisation.
The course is split across three lessons with each one representing a different milestone reached in your attempt to initially introduce and then embed a mentoring programme within your organisation. Within each lesson, we ask you a series of questions where you will have some research to do using the links provided. These articles, videoclips and websites are accessed using the “Materials” tab which you will see above the scenario details and also above the assessment questions.
These resources will not hand you the assessment answers immediately. You will need to read and digest them to find the specific pieces of information needed to answer the questions. This will have the effect of cementing the learning in your memory as you use what learning psychologists call “active processing” to understand the materials and extract the information you need. If you get an answer wrong, don’t despair; go back and look again. All the information you need is there to be found. Remember that one or more of the options may be correct for each assessment question. Select as many of the options as you think are applicable.