Entries by Jean Rhodes

What a wildly improbable movie can teach us about mentoring

by Jean Rhodes In the comedy, Role Models, two self-absorbed salesmen, Danny and Wheeler, are arrested following a road rage incident and elect to perform community service hours over going to jail. They are assigned to work at a mentoring program where Danny is paired with a nerdy role-playing game enthusiast while Wheeler finds himself […]

Good news!: The “Elements” lead to effective practice

by Jean Rhodes If you haven’t been using MENTOR’s Elements of Effective Practice (EEPM) you’re missing a golden opportunity to improve relationship length and strength. Of course, many mentoring practitioners know the EEPM well—in fact some have even witnessed its evolution from a somewhat unwieldy grab bag of ideas to a more tightly stipulated set of safety […]

A hidden benefit of cross-race/culture mentoring

How Diversity Makes Us Smarter Being around people who are different from us makes us more creative, more diligent and harder-working By Katherine W. Phillips (from Scientific American) Credit: Edel Rodriguez In Brief Decades of research by organizational scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists and demographers show that socially diverse groups (that is, those with a diversity of […]

Predicting the future of mentoring programs

by Jean Rhodes I predict that formal mentoring programs will become increasingly specialized, professionalized, and evidence-based in the years ahead. This is a positive development, particularly given that our field’s two most important barometers of success—the number of adults willing to serve as volunteer mentors and the effectiveness of these efforts—have not changed in the past […]

Mentoring’s Promise and Limits

By Larry Gordon Editor’s Note: This article appeared recently in the Atlantic. Research on the long-term effects of advisers is mixed, and some programs are now relying on video-game networks and other technology to forge stronger relationships. Fred Thornhill / Reuters When Leo Hall was 8 years old, his mother sent him to a tutoring […]