Adam Grant is one of my favourite authors. His latest book, Hidden Potential (2023), is a must read for educators, in particular. It is full of ideas that can help us look for and help students reach their potential, hidden for various reasons, and help them achieve. I have always believed that each student holds the key to their learning needs, skills, and the barriers that have to be overcome/addressed in their learning journeys. After reading this book, infused with inspiring stories about learning and unlocking possibilities for people, it’s hard not to think of the ways it can help improve educators and education. This book has helped me formulate new ideas about learning and how to improve my practice. It has also helped me celebrate my mentorship mindset.
Over many years, I have developed a mindset that helps me learn from others, utilize mentorship to help me work through the challenges of implementing new ideas, and reflect with mentors on how those changes impact my classroom and my work as an educator. Adam Grant speaks of this throughout his book.
Mentorship is a powerful tool for learning, well-being, and building efficacy for educators. If utilized well, mentorship can be a part of every and any stage of your career in education. The goal of school is learning, but learning can happen anywhere. The same is true with mentorship for educators. Schools benefit from fostering mentorship, but not only through formal experiences. Mentorship may happen through a program or from the teacher down the hall, but it can also be a way of thinking and something you can do any and every where by cultivating a mentorship mindset.
Mindset is a term used to describe a person’s way of thinking. In her now famous book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2007) asserting growth mindset as key for learning, Carol Dweck defines mindset as a self-perception or “self-theory” that people hold about themselves. Believing that you are either “intelligent” or “unintelligent” is a simple example of a mindset. Building a mentorship mindset, then, involves a set of beliefs about your own ability to grow and learn through mentorship. Having a mentorship mindset means looking for mentorship opportunities. It means knowing yourself and believing that mentorship can help you figure out what you need. A mentorship mindset is a great way to discover the hidden potential in yourself and others.
I am thrilled to share that our work on building a mentorship mindset is part of our first academic publication as a lead team at The Mentoree. Dr. Teri Rubinoff, Christine Chin, and I coauthored a chapter in the forthcoming book, Mentoring for Wellbeing in Schools edited by Benjamin Kutsyuruba of Queen’s University and Frances K. Kochan of Auburn University. This volume of the Perspectives on Mentoring Series, due out next month, explores the role of mentoring in promoting wellbeing of both mentees/proteges and mentors in K-12 school settings. The focus of this collection is on how mentoring can promote mental health, build resilience, and develop capacity to maintain and sustain emotional, psychological, and social wellbeing for all in K-12 school settings. In our chapter titled Creating a Supportive Virtual Mentorship Community for Educators Through The Mentoree, we introduce the idea of a mentorship mindset, but it is something that I have been speaking about with faculties of education across the province when presenting on our work at The Mentoree and it is part of one of my keynotes.
Teachers are told that they need to be lifelong learners, but how do we ensure that educators continue to be open to learning and growth throughout their careers. There are so many different types of educators out there. Many are intrinsically motivated and driven, many just get through, and many more languish in competency but are not driven to do more than muddle through the day to day. They get through and do their “jobs”, but what if their job was to be a learner and perpetual mentee? What if being a lifelong learner was part of the requirements of the job? What if evidence of lifelong learning was not a laundry list of courses or credentials but a conversation or work sample of how that learning impacted practice? How do we help give teachers the confidence to build efficacy, and a mindset for continual growth in addition to competence? What is the fuel that they need to drive their learning, to seek new ideas, to tool themselves to sustain their learning stance throughout their careers and actually embody the goal of lifelong learner noted in their job descriptions?
As Adam Grant shared, expertise is not the primary skill needed for effective mentorship. It’s empathy. As he notes in the book, if you are so advanced in your skills and at or approaching master, you have likely become less consciously aware of the fundamentals needed to help someone understand the basics. When you learn from someone who excels in a field, while inspiring, it can leave you feeling a sense of limitations instead of possibility. It can actually leave you feeling more frustrated and less competent as you become aware of the divide between you. As well, others can not personalize the advice or support they give you, so a single mentor is less effective overall than gathering a bevy of mentors and weaving their tips together to pave the avenues that work best for you. That leaves you with more control of your learning and your journey, and it helps you develop the mentorship mindset that is key to learning from others in order to be on a path of continuous growth.
Learning from others should be active. For the same reasons that professional development doesn’t always have the intended impact on educators, mentorship can fall into the trap of being passive. If you are part of the empty vessel mentality, your mentorship is about seeking and implementing the wisdom of a mentor. There is more impact and longevity, though, when both the mentor and mentee take active roles in their mentorship relationship. This definition of mentorship is a change from the idea of the learned pouring ideas into the learner. In the mentorship we espouse and champion at The Mentoree there is a reciprocal relationship where both the mentor and mentee benefit from the relationship. It's not a sit and get scenario, like some professional development experiences, The mentee is an active partner in building and maintaining their mentorship relationship and maintaining agency in terms of how they seek and use the advice of the mentors that they curate for themselves.
As Grant says as he begins wrapping up Hidden Potential, “People with grander dreams go further. [Dreams] make a unique contribution to who they become.” As Jose, who is quoted in the book, learned from his lived experiences, there is more than one goal and purpose in life. If we help educators find and live their dreams, develop goals, and discover their hidden potential as they seek and uncover the potential of the learners in their care, they are more likely to achieve their dreams. Not all educators' dreams relate to education, but many do. People who are fulfilled in and outside of their work, though, have more to contribute to their work because they aren’t pouring from empty cups. Mentors help us develop our confidence, ability, and motivation to learn and a mentorship mindset can help us unleash our inner magicians and believe in the magic that we can create for ourselves and our students. A mentorship mindset can help anyone learn, improve, grow, and achieve their goals and even their dreams, too.
