Reflection in mentoring

Overview

Reflection is important for mentors in two ways: one, they need to reflect on their own practice and position in the mentoring relationship; and two, they need to facilitate a reflective space where their mentee feels comfortable and able to revisit experiences and thoughts, critically evaluate them, and take the learning forward into future experiences. Specifically, a mentor can help by asking questions and provide perspectives the student might not have thought of themselves.

Theoretical perspective

When trying to be intentional in our learning processes, reflection plays a key role in providing us with insights into our ways of doing things (Mezirow, 1991).  Reflection, which is the act of critically examining our experiences and thoughts with the goal of learning from them, helps provide meaning to experiences, reframe challenges as learning, and show us how to improve our practice (Mezirow, 1991; Schön 1983).  Reflection is often done by working through a series of reflective prompts or questions, and can follow steps as highlighted in models of reflections, such as Driscoll’s “What? So what? Now what?”-model (Driscoll, 1994), that sees a reflector first engage with the event, then extract learning from it, before planning how to use this learning in the future.

Helping the mentee reflect

While reflection is often presented as a personal and individual process, there is a lot of benefit in having other people’s help in reflection.  A mentoring relationship can be just that help; Felten et al. (2013) describes a mentor as someone who creates a conversational environment where a mentee may ask questions, investigate concerns, and share thoughts before coming up with their own solutions.  Mentors can support this space by asking the mentee questions about their experiences and thoughts to guide the mentee’s thinking and ensure their solutions are considered and realistic.  In essence, the mentor can use the mentoring space to facilitate reflection for their mentee.  This serves two purposes in that it both ensures that a mentee protects time for regular reflection, as well as helping the mentee by asking questions they would not have thought of before or by themselves, effectively making the space a place for co-creation of knowledge.  Reflective questioning from the mentor can also lead to the mentee to take different perspectives in their learning, which Brookfield (1995) highlights as important in reflective learning.  When a mentee thinks through other possible interpretations of their experiences they can challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions of a situation.  The mentor can support the mentee in discovering new knowledge about themselves and their assumptions by using questions to invite the mentee to explore different perspectives and avenues of thinking.

Reflecting on own practice

The second way in which reflection is essential to a mentor is to reflect on your own practice.  As a mentor, you will bring in all your own experiences, thoughts, biases, and way of doing things.  To best support your mentee, you need to examine these and seek to improve as a mentor as well.  A mentor who reflects on their own practice, is someone who understands that they are not perfect and seeks to learn ways to better support their mentee.  As Zachery (2000) highlights “All mentoring relationships are embedded in context. Context influences how we perceive reality, what we see as possible and achievable (The mentor’s guide, p.33). For instance, the way you see mentoring will influence how you are going to support your mentee, but also the expectations you knowingly or unknowingly have of your mentee.

Therefore, it can be valuable to reflect on your own practice as a mentor and what expectations and experiences you bring with you into your mentoring space, see also (‘Becoming aware of personal biases’).

Context for mentoring African International Students

There are two main considerations you should have about reflection when mentoring interculturally.  The first consideration is to reflect on your own biases and power (see ‘Becoming aware of personal biases’, and ‘Challenging power in mentoring relationships’).  When mentoring it is generally valuable to reflect on your effectiveness as a mentor, but specifically when mentoring underrepresented minorities and interculturally you should spend extra time exploring your biases, cultural conceptions, and the power dynamics in the relationship to ensure that the space is as equitable as possible; this will help create a space where both you as a mentor and the mentee are learning and co-creating knowledge.

The second consideration is related to the amount the mentor should challenge a mentee to think differently on their experiences and way of doing things.  Using reflective questions to invite the mentee to explore a topic from different perspectives is key; however, we should be conscious as to not undermine the lived experience of our mentee. For example, it will be extremely difficult for a white male professor to understand the experiences of a black female student, and therefore the mentor should be extremely considerate if consciously or unconsciously challenging an experience that relates to racism and misogyny.  This does not mean that a mentor cannot explore such experiences with their mentee; there is potential for transformational learning in such experiences, but the mentor should know about and check their privileges if or when doing so.

Useful Links

For a resource on reflection in general – see the Reflection Toolkit .

The Reflection Toolkit