What Are The Qualities Of A Good Mentor Teacher?

Everyone needs someone as a mentor in their lives to guide them, advise them and listen to them, especially the students. In today’s ever-changing world students constantly need to keep learning new skills while attending their online classes, completing homework and assignments and preparing for exams. In such times they need mentors, although they have friends and family to listen to, they can’t provide students with professional advice. 

Today, every school and educational institute is prioritising and hiring mentor teachers, mentor teachers are not like the pedagogy teachers who teach online and take classes. Their job is a bit different and is as important as any other teacher. 

So, to know who mentor teachers are and what qualities they possess that help students? Keep reading the article.

Who Are Mentor Teachers?

A Mentor Teacher is a person who helps the students in their professional growth, they guide students at every necessary step. The role of a mentor teacher is to facilitate the growth of the pupil by recommending them new skills to learn and knowledge to gain; they help the students to build confidence and develop the aptitude and attitude necessary for their career. Mentoring is a necessary part of the education journey of any student, but it’s often neglected; having a mentor is not just essential for students’ professional development but mentors also boost the morale of the students by motivating and cheering them up. The relationship between mentor and mentees keeps evolving throughout mentoring from a guide to a motivator or sometimes a coach.

Qualities Of A Good Mentor

Communicate: Mentoring is different from regular classroom teaching, in mentoring, a teacher is not explaining any subject or chapter to the students, they are giving professional guidance to the students. And for this, mentors and mentees need to talk, we know students can be shy and feel anxious sometimes to talk; it’s the mentor’s responsibility to initiate the communication. Mentor teachers should have great communication skills to interact and connect with students so that students can ask their queries and share their problems without hesitating with their mentors.

Listen To The Students:  Mentors are not the ones who just keep speaking they need to listen too, a good mentor always listens more to the students than speaks. The work of mentors is to guide the mentee to find their right career path, yes mentors can suggest or add comments about things, but the last decision to make is for students to make. So, when coming to you with their confusion and difficulties, answer them and solve their queries without any intervention of your personal opinions. For example, as a mentor, you think that the mentee needs to socialise more and learn public speaking skills for their personality development; however, the student is happy as he or she is and doesn’t want to talk more. In such a case, a mentor can only suggest ways to the mentee but can’t do anything on behalf of them.

Give Honest Feedback: A good mentor knows when their mentees need feedback to improve themselves. As discussed in the above point, mentors can’t make decisions on behalf of mentees, but they can give feedback and constructive criticism to them; so they don’t make any substantial mistakes. No one likes to be criticised, the same goes for the students; so mentors need to give feedback to the students in a way that they don’t feel offended. Mentors can give them examples or tell them that if they choose this, that could happen which will not be good for them or share their mistakes and tell students that they can learn from it and not make the same mistakes.

Observe The Mentees: Mentors don’t always intervene or give advice to students, they need to observe them too. Let them be, and see how they are performing in their classes, discuss students’ academic progress with their subject teacher who’s online teaching them and let them make a few mistakes to learn from them.

Talk To Parents: Mentors also need to connect with parents, talk to them about the students’ professional development, and how they can help in it.