1. Alex Boswell
12/5/2012
Professional Growth
The Art of Mentoring
The document below is a description of a program I attended in September 2011 called The Art of
Mentoring. At this program, I connected with all kinds of people from around the world. Some of them were
people who worked in mainstream public education settings, while others were people who created unique
after school programs or their own schools with creative methods for education. The Art of Mentoring was a
meeting place for people of all ages, professions, and cultural backgrounds to come together and talk about
cultivating healthy communities, with attention to diversity and supporting the skills or gifts of all individuals.
This program contributed to my professional growth, by providing me with useful tools and insights for
teaching.
The program was facilitated in a way in which participants not only talked about developing healthy
communities, but took part in practicing it within the temporary community that we created for the duration of
the program. This experiential knowledge was created through both challenging group activities and individual
projects that embraced critical thinking and self­exploration. In addition, the program did not have a hired staff
to cook or clean. Participants worked in groups to perform those tasks. Around fifty adults, ranging in ages
twenty to ninety, participated in the program, as well as an estimated thirty children, ranging from newborns to
teenagers. Experiencing a lesson, rather than gaining a strictly cerebral understanding, was an important aspect
of the program for me. It contributed to my ideas about the kind of work I expect to do in my profession,
which is work that students can feel personally invested in and challenged by, with an emphasis on experiential
knowledge as a tool for intellectual growth.
Here are some other lessons that I took home from the program:
1) Good teachers or mentors can build understanding solely through the questions they ask.
2) It is important to know who I am working with, in order to ask meaningful questions. For example, it would
be important to know if a student knew what a body paragraph was, before delving more deeply into essay
writing. In addition, it's important to know what excites students and what they're interested in, to ask
meaningful and relevant questions.
3) Strong learning can't happen without a connection or relationship to the knowledge that a person is trying to
build.
4) Hearing each other's stories and having fun is important in building community and in creating positive
educational settings. It helps to develop fully expressed, confident, connected, and community­minded
individuals.
5) I learned techniques for conflict resolution, as well as ways of acknowledging historical, cultural, and
individual experiences of trauma that affect our ability to create healthy communities and to feel safe or
welcomed in a classroom.
6) Young people need more ways to cultivate their gifts and initiate themselves into their communities. 7) In an
evolving culture, our youth should, ideally, exceed past where an older generation was at their age.
8) Resilient systems have (1) short feedback loops, so it feeds back into itself. One example of this could be
having all participants in constant communication and able to express their needs. A resilient system is also (2)
designed with diverse parts to maintain the whole.
9) In group work, it can be beneficial for each student to take on a different role to contribute to the whole.

2. Lastly, throughout the program, the facilitators told students where each lesson was heading. Each
facilitator, at the beginning of a presentation, carefully and concisely mapped out and shared with participants
the goals of their lesson, how the lesson was connected to past lessons, and how the facilitator planned to get
us to reach the goal. This served as an example of something that I would like to do in my own classroom. It is
easier to absorb information when you know what it is linked to and what it is meant to build.
The Art of Mentoring placed me in a setting where I experienced many aspects of what it
takes to be a good teacher and mentor. I also learned how to contribute in building healthy communities and
classroom settings, as well as how healthy community spaces produce greater possibilities for everyone,
including future generations. The Art of Mentoring served as a source of professional growth that helped me to
feel more prepared as an educator.