Entries by Jean Rhodes

The Badge Boom Is Coming to Mentoring: Is that a Good Thing?

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By Jean Rhodes Universities, youth-serving organizations, and training providers are increasingly offering professional development certificates, digital badges, stackable learning experiences, other “microcredentials” for people who mentor, supervise, and support young people. And, a recent report, featuring a survey of 880 mentoring professionals, helps explain why (Garringer et al., 2026). The report describes a highly educated […]

“I felt like I was nobody. Then I felt alive:” Inside the classrooms where Black male teachers became mentors

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Jones, K. V., Porter, S., Cooley, S., Haizlip, A., Parish, L., Muhammad, A. A., & Hawkins, I. L. (2026). Mentoring within a culturally responsive program: Insights from Black males and adolescents. Urban Education. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420859261474227 By Jean rhodes Caring adults already embedded in young people’s daily settings may be the field’s most valuable […]

The Question Colleges Forget to Ask

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Hersch, E., Werntz, A., Deng, Y., Jasman, M., & Rhodes, J. (2026). Can I help with that? The role of goal setting in a technology-enabled peer mentoring program. Journal of Community Psychology, 54, e70115. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcop.70115 Jean Rhodes Most colleges ask incoming students for immunization records, housing choices, and a meal-plan preference. Far fewer ask what […]

I, Claudia: An Underrepresented Voice in AI

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By Jean Rhodes I first raised this idea with my sister, a computer scientist. What if Anthropic had named its chatbot Claudia instead of Claude? It sounds like a trivial branding choice, but names shape perception in ways we rarely notice until we start to notice them, and now I can’t help noticing! Every day, […]

How shared laughter can strengthen mentoring relationships

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“Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.” —Victor Borge by Jean Rhodes It’s August, so let’s focus on a sunny topic: laughter. August is also when I fell for someone who made me laugh out loud (literally, since there was no texting back then). We were new faculty members on a campus arts center […]

Why “Someone like me” Matters in Mentor Matching

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By Jean Rhodes How important is it for mentors and mentees to be matched on the basis of shared gender, race, major, background, or lived experience? My team and I examined this question in a university-wide peer mentoring program serving 2,072 first-year college students. Students were matched only by major, which created a rare opportunity […]

Wisdom from Professor Carola Suárez-Orozco

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Editor’s Note: A version of this appeared a few years ago but the topic seems particularly relevant these days. With this in mind, here’s a shortened version Hope it’s helpful! by Jean Rhodes Carola Suárez-Orozco, Senior Fellow at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development and the Director of the Immigrant Flourishing and […]

What the Odyssey Gets Right About Mentoring

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By Jean Rhodes Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens this week in theaters, and audiences will watch Zendaya play Athena, the shape-shifting goddess who guides young Telemachus while his father, Odysseus, is lost at sea. Athena appears to Telemachus, played by Tom Holland, in the form of Mentor. She accompanies him, encourages him, and helps him […]

Research shows lifelong influence of mentors: But there’s a catch

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 by Jean E. Rhodes It almost goes without saying that natural mentors can be enormously influential– from early childhood through adolescence and early adulthood. But, because such relationships can not be randomly assigned, it is actually a bit difficult to untangle their causes from their effects. Some pepole are “mentor magnets” and some communities are teeming […]