Duration: 7m11s

Hi everyone, I'm Kay Schlesinger from KG Educational Consulting and as part of AUSMASA's VET Resource Hub, this video looks at professional learning for mentors. So let's begin together. 
One of the 10 high-impact teaching strategies researched by Hattie and others is the notion that a learning intention: one of the things that we can use to improve learning. So our learning intention today: we are learning strategies to support 
the professional development of mentors within the automotive and mining sectors. 

 An overview of our video today will investigate 2 areas, learning the mentoring role and reflection questions. 

 Topic one, learning the mentoring role. 
Mentors are not born, they develop. There is no organisation in the country where somebody fronted for their first day of mentoring and had all of the skills in place. It doesn't work like that. Mentors actually need support to learn the new role they are undertaking.

That support can come in many forms. It could be a community of support; it could be professional reading. There are many ways that mentors can be supported. I would suggest that a combination of these strategies is most successful. So that's something to consider in your mentoring program. 

Professional learning for mentors needs to be quite comprehensive because as we said, this is a learnt skill.

So, what sort of things should be included in this type of program? Well, we'd obviously want to look at what the benefits are for all of the stakeholders and why are we doing this? Why are we undertaking mentoring? What's in and what's out? That notion of a transformative power of mentoring that can change individuals, teams and in fact organisations.

A literature review to base all of the practice within an evidence-based program. Principles that underpin best practice, mentoring conversations, not just telling people what you think, but having a conversation that involves real dialogue, and then, of course, reflecting on mentoring. 

 A community of practice is another professional learning activity that can be extremely successful. This is where mentors join together at set times in their schedules to have a conversation about their practice. And it's really important that it is at set times, because otherwise in the hurly burly of work life, the community of practice meetings drift away because we're too busy.

So it needs to be led by an experienced mentor or indeed a consultant. And the spirit of these sessions in the community of practice need to be around support and empowering the new mentors, and of course, when we share things in a community of practice, we need to ensure that we never break the trust of the mentee, so we can speak. 

generally about things that we are hearing or experiencing, but we would never recount mentoring conversations. So that's something important to consider. 

 A mentor's mentor, that would be an experienced mentor who can really help mentors based on their own practice and what they have learnt, or a consultant who has dealt with setting up mentoring programs in organisations who acts as a guide. 
on the side. 

 And then of course, there is all of the array of professional reading and viewing. So that might be particular material relevant to the mining and automotive sectors. It could also be the array of materials that you can find in the AUSMASA VET resource hub because there are many, many mentoring topics covered there. And it might be also video clips like the one you're viewing today that addresses relevant aspects of mentoring. 

 I think it's really, really important that we are all reasonable with ourselves as we learn these new skills. We need to prioritise time for our learning and remember that our mentoring skills develop over time. And I like this quote by Stephen Covey and he says, ‘when you have too many top priorities, you effectively have no top priorities.’ So my hint to you is work out your top mentoring priorities. 

 The second part of the presentation today is around reflection questions. So, let's have a look at the questions that we can share and consider today. What are two ways that you would like to learn the mentoring role? 
What support might be best placed after the first round of mentoring? 
How could a community of practice strengthen mentor skills and confidence?  

What feedback could you give your organisation about your mentoring professional learning? 

 So, reviewing our video today, we had two areas of focus: learning the mentoring role and reflection questions. 

 Our learning intention, we've been learning strategies to support the professional development of mentors within the automotive and mining sectors. 

 That brings us to the end of this video. You can watch the other videos in the series and explore more resources available in the AUMASA Vet Resource Hub.  

Thanks for sharing the session today. 

END.