Entries by Jean Rhodes

The urgent message coming from boys and young men

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By Jean Rhodes On Thursday at noon, the Center for Evidence-Based Mentoring and MentorPRO will be hosting a webinar with Niobe Way, Professor of Applied Psychology at New York University. She is also the former President of the Society for Research on Adolescence and the author of the new book Rebels With a Cause: Reimagining […]

Principles in practice: A review of Peter Samuelson’s new book on PYD

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By Jean Rhodes Peter L. Samuelson’s Positive Youth Development Principles in Practice is an ambitious and deeply researched exploration of how youth service organizations can create environments that help young people thrive. Drawing on his tenure as Director of Research and Evaluation at the Thrive Foundation for Youth, Samuelson synthesizes years of fieldwork, interviews, and theoretical […]

Reimagining mentoring through an equity lens

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By Jean Rhodes “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.” – Benjamin Brewster The field of youth mentoring has experienced remarkable growth and evolution over the past two decades, fundamentally shaped by three theoretical frameworks developed in the mid-2000s. These foundational models – Keller’s systemic model, Spencer’s relational model, […]

Student chatbots are super friendly and helpful: That’s what worries me

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By Jean Rhodes As universities grapple with surging demand for student services, artificial intelligence has emerged as a seductive solution. Chatbots, armed with sophisticated natural language processing, are increasingly deployed to handle everything from basic inquiries to complex tasks like course selection and degree planning. These digital assistants, available 24/7, promise to alleviate the burden […]

What we talk about when we talk about evidence

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By Jean Rhodes Researchers, practitioners, and policymakers tend to define key terms—“empirical research” and “evidence”—quite differently. Whereas most researchers employ the two terms interchangeably to mean “findings derived from empirical methods,” studies suggest that practitioners working in the field tend to define evidence more broadly as stemming not only from scientific methods, but also from […]

Beyond the Compliment Sandwich: A New Recipe for Solving the Mentor’s Dilemma

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By Jean Rhodes For years, educators and mentors have wrestled with what Stanford psychologist Geoffrey Cohen has termed “mentor’s dilemma” – the delicate balance between offering honest criticism and avoiding discouragement, particularly when working with students from minority backgrounds. This challenge extends beyond academia, affecting coaches, volunteer and natural mentors, parents and more. Cohen’s work […]

10 research-based tips for building strong helping relationships with youth

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by Jean Rhodes Particularly since good working relationships between youth and mentors are the stock and trade of formal mentoring programs, it is surprising that the field has not sought to more directly benefit from the decades of careful clinical research on working alliances. Along these lines, University of South Florida psychologist Marc Karver and […]