Creating and Sustaining a Collaborative Mentorship Team

Book excerpt: In response to changes in the workforce, scholars are calling for mentoring that is more fluid, flexible, and responsive to the needs of diverse groups of individuals, whether culturally (Kochan & Pascarelli, 2012; Kochan, Searby, George, & Mitchell Edge, 2015) or intergenerationally (Thorpe, 2012) diverse. With these changes, there are greater demands for intergenerational and intercultural collaboration and mentoring. One response to these changes is to take a more collaborative, interactive, and transformational approach to mentoring. In response, this book provides a model for collaborative mentoring, based on best-practice, grounded in theory and research, and framed by the Dynamic Model of Collaborative Mentorship. Each chapter provides a description of one of the five components of the mentoring model which are grounded in theory and include: agency, values, engagement, patterns, and roles. Individual chapters provide resources, prompts and questions to guide reflection, and suggested readings. This book is authored by four individuals who work, research, and write as a team. The book itself is the product of their mentoring research as well as their mentoring practice in action. It is current and timely, focusing on team processes which are collaborative, dynamic, reflective, and continuously developing and evolving.