Setting the tempo for 2018 at the National Mentoring Summit, DC

The National Mentoring Summit was something I had appreciated and admired from afar for many years. It is convened annually by ‘MENTOR — The National Mentoring Partnership’, an advocacy organisation for the mentoring sector in America. The summit convenes practitioners, academics, corporate and government leaders every year to share current research, champion best practices and build a more vibrant mentoring community.

This cool welcome letter from former President Obama got the summit off to a good start. Mentorship has been a key element of Obama’s post presidential legacy and work.

There was so much to take in, and take away. I spent a few days writing up thoughts from the many excellent workshops, discussions and panels I sat in for:

The Effect Size of Mentoring

Professor Jean Rhodes, of the University of Massachusetts — Boston, whose group runs the excellent Chronicle of Evidence Based Mentoring, presented her team’s work on a new meta-analysis to study the average effect size of mentoring. A meta analysis looks at combining multiple scientific studies to arrive at a combined estimate, in this case of an effect size. The effect size measures the size of difference in outcome indicators resulting from an intervention. Her finding was similar to the first meta-analysis done by David DuBois and colleagues in 2010–2011, which was that the average effect size of mentoring is in the 0.2 range, which would qualify as small. As she articulates in her recent blog, mentoring practitioners and advocates have to acknowledge that general relationship focused interventions and the lack of standardised evidence-based program practices, are making generalised effect sizes of mentoring programs small. This compared to interventions like psychotherapy or prevention studies (programs that look to prevent human dysfunctions before they occur) which report moderate to large effect sizes. This is a clarion call for sure. At the surface, this can be hard to digest, because the central and very attractive premise of mentoring is the potential of transformation that comes from a relationship between a young person and a trusting, caring adult. I see the news more as testament to the growing complexity of the lives young people lead in today’s world. We see it in our programs — no two young people have a similar trajectory. Their internal traits and external circumstances combine to present specific needs and areas of opportunity for a mentor and the program. A program and a mentor will need the capacity to understand and synthesise these needs, and and then form specific templates of how different kinds of youth are supported. As an example, a young person’s mentoring trajectory for social and emotional skills learning should look very different from a trajectory of mentorship for career awareness. These differences should reflect in the outcome measures, the curriculum/input to the mentor, and the support from the program itself. Prof Rhodes notes that such strategies are already resulting in larger effect sizes for mentoring programs. If universally applied, these will lead to an improvement for the sector itself in the next decade.

This summer, at Mentor Together Bangalore, we conclude a 3 year study of high-school students in Bangalore. We’ve followed a cohort of 200 students from Grade 8 through 10. 100 of the students participated in our mentoring programs and 100 did not. We’ve tracked them 2 times already on various measures of well-being, grades and attendance. We will study their paths and home conditions for a 3rd year as they graduate out of high school. This will be our chance to study what worked and didn’t work as processes, practices and outcomes on our end, and contribute back to the research field that we learn so much from.

Prof Rhodes’ session at the very beginning of the conference got me into a more reflective but optimistic mental state. It was also quite exciting in a nerdish way to see Professor Rhodes. Her model for the impact of a mentor is one our team knows and explains off the back of our hand, to hundreds of mentors every year! So I enjoyed the opportunity to nod along in-person (instead of reading) to her always excellent insights.

Attunement in Mentoring Relationships

This session was led by Dr.Julia Pryce of the Loyola School of Social Work, Chicago. This wasn’t my first time ‘meeting’ Julia. Our team had a Skype video meeting with her in September 2017 during our annual retreat, where we learned of some of her cutting edge work in the field of attunement, and the impact of attuned mentors on the relationship. In the previous session, Prof Rhodes also shared the finding that mentors from “helping professions”, example a nurse, have more impactful relationships. I would think it is because of the training that such professionals have in understanding the thoughts, feeling and needs of whom they work with, and then shaping their words and actions, to meet those needs. This makes the idea of training on skills like attunement so important for all mentors, especially since mentor populations are generally very diversified in their representation of backgrounds.

From her work, Julia defines attunement in many different constructs — both behaviour and intention:

• In behaviour, the ability to respond flexibly to verbal and non-verbal cues by taking into account others’ needs and desires
• In intent, the strategy to converse by eliciting, reading, interpreting and reflecting on others’ cues
• in behaviour, the ability to adapt expectations based on others’ interests.

Julia observed mentor-mentee pairs in a site-based program in America, and picked up on verbal and non-verbal cues to understand how attuned mentors were, and the impact of that on mentee behaviour during the interaction. She found 40% of mentors to be highly attuned, 45% of mentors to be moderately attuned and 15% of mentors to be minimally attuned.

The second part of Julia’s very interesting talk spoke about the model for developing more attunement in mentors — called the FAN (Facilitating Attuned Interactions), which draws on a national model developed for home visits with families of colicky babies. This training has been delivered to mentors and program staff who work with mentors, and the results in developing more attuned mentors are promising!

What I’m very excited about is that MT will work with Julia’s this year, to draw on her expertise to developing attunement trainings for our mentors. We will study how attuned they feel over the course of the relationship, and see how that impacts the overall course of their mentorship.

A Study on the Long-Term Impact of a School Mentoring Program

On Day 2, I sat in for a workshop from Michael Karcher, of the University of San Antonio at Texas. His talk was appealingly titled calculating the return on investment in mentoring.

Prof Karcher tracked a cohort of around 550 mentees from the Communities in School program, who were in elementary, middle and high school. Half of the students received mentoring and half did not. He tracked them first across a 2 year period when the mentoring was more recent an intervention, and then after a longer period, when at least 5 years had passed since all youth had completed high-school. His study threw up some really interesting results:

• Within the 2 year period, mentoring benefitted the elementary school boys and the high-school girls the most, especially in areas like school connectedness, empathy, helpfulness and connection with culturally different peers. He found that mentorship that happened for kids in high-school was a lot more goal-focused compared to the program for children in elementary school. This was considered to necessary for the age group of children. High school boys however recorded lower relationship quality with their mentors, and fewer gains than elementary school students. In his follow-up study, Prof Karcher found that mentored youth had significantly greater numbers who pursued post-secondary education, and significantly fewer who were arrested on disdemeanours. Prof Karcher humorously concluded from this that he would title his paper ‘A swift kick in the pants’ to illustrate the long-term benefits of mentoring (More of Prof Karcher’s humour can be seen on his personal website).
• The second was the importance of the construct of ‘mattering’. How much a child felt they mattered in their interactions with mentors was an important predictor of outcomes. At Mentor Together, we use scales like the ‘Match Relationship Quality’ to assess things like how comfortable and valued the mentee feels in the relationship. The mattering scale could be an important addition to this, for us to look up.

Professor Karcher’s return on investment calculation is still a work-in-progress. I made a mental note to check back in a few months with him to see how that had turned out. A good compilation of Prof Karcher’s work on school-based mentoring can be found here.

Youth-Initiated Mentoring

This was a topic that came up over multiple sessions during the conference. Despite the significant effort in supporting and growing the mentoring field in America over the last 3 decades, the mentoring gap is wide. This study found that one in three young people surveyed did not have a mentor while they were growing up. A further extrapolation projected that 16 million young people, including 9 million at-risk young people, will reach adulthood without connecting with a mentor of any kind.

Given that the real ceiling in formal mentoring programs have always been in the recruitment and retention of mentors, thought has been put into what can be newer models of mentorship. One among them, youth-initiated mentoring, i.e. the idea of having youth identify and recruit their own mentors, comes across as a particularly potent and relevant strategy.

Prof Rhodes and others have found in studies that when youth are asked about the presence of a natural mentor in their life, an answer in the affirmative correlates strongly with the youth coming from background of greater economic means. So the poorer the youth (and greater the need of mentorship), lesser the chances of them having a natural mentor in their life already. Makes sense. That’s why formal mentorship exists, right. But now if formal mentoring programs don’t grow as rapidly, would it make sense to train youth from low-income families on identifying, attracting and building their own natural mentors?

A very interesting module built by a team at Innovation Research & Training , led by Dr.Janis Kupersmidt, is training first-generation college students in such skills, as they enter college. Early studies have found that within one semester, youth who received such training had significantly better grades, less avoidance from problems and more help-seeking behaviour.

My colleagues who work on a final year mentorship program for 10th graders have been closely following the discussions on youth-initiated mentorship. It appears to us as a very relevant closure module for youth as they prepare for college or vocational paths, allowing them to take charge of their mentorship, prepare for new environments, and build greater agency. We see ourselves adapting from this program toolkit to deliver a similar set of sessions to our mentees once their grade 10 exams are done.

Deep Impact & Critical Mentoring

One of the most heartening things for me in the Summit was the resonance amongst speakers to ensure mentoring relationships and programs are long-lasting, always built around the youth needs, and address the important factors of youth lives (where race, sexuality, caste or other socio-economic factors). A book that addresses these topics, called Critical Mentoring, is hailed as a must-read for practitioners.

So many programs, like Summer Search, span 7–9 years, supporting young people from middle school all the way to college! This was incredibly heartening to hear. Our longest program supports young people for 3 years, and a common question to us is to justify the duration of support. I believe that fundamentally changing the trajectory for young people requires investing in their lives for much longer periods. When the conditions of poverty or disadvantage are as entrenched (see this excellent paper which finds that almost half the children of agricultural labourers end up becoming agricultural labourers) as they are for the most marginalised, it’s not just one thing or one hurdle that they have to overcome. The avenues for development are also varied as young people mature and grow over years. If we all look back to our experiences, it was the sustained involvement of caregivers, teachers, mentors and others that helped us discover, develop and apply our skills and talents over year. I am completely convinced that MT has to advocate for longer periods of mentorship for youth who face the highest risks, starting probably from early in middle school. It will be tremendously exciting for us to create multi-year meaningful mentorship pathways for such youth. For alumni youth who may require fewer years of mentoring, we have to devise a low-cost way to engage them over the years, to be able to track their progress and address their needs.

Over the next 3 years, we hope to work directly with close to 20,000 youth. Inspired from the conference, I hope we can deliver a mentorship intervention of a median duration of at least 3 years to all these youth, and track their progress and development on critical parameters of well-being, academic and career progress, for at least 4 years on average. I think this will build an incredibly data-rich story of how young people in India are preparing for the future. Something I believe that doesn’t exist today.

I had some time post conference to meet folks from mentoring organisations at their offices— the Big Brothers & Sisters of NY, America Needs You, Spark, and Summer Search. I’ll share more of my key learnings from these visits in another blog soon.