learning from experience

partnerships and co-mentoring

Some educators advocate an approach to learning, both in pre-service years and throughout teachers’ professional lives, that encourages learning partnerships rather than one group learning from another. In these partnerships, relationships are characterized by a blurring of the line between teacher and learner. Mullen and Kealey referred to it as a much richer form of ‘mentoring’ than is traditionally understood by that term. This is how they describe it:

‘Mentoring does not need to imply a hierarchical arrangement or status differential, nor does it need to imply that teaching and learning occur as a one-way street. Rather the potential for synergistic co-mentoring exists between mentors and mentees….. Mentoring becomes paradoxically empowered as mentors’ and mentees’ roles become indistinguishable. Co-mentoring is a process wherein learning becomes greater than the capacity for individuals to produce on their own, without guidance or feedback. Attribution of who has done or created what part of larger whole becomes ‘difficult’ when co-mentors speak in their learning of shared responsibility, and synergistic efforts.’

Mullen and Kealey (1999)
New Directions in Mentoring:
Creating a culture of synergy (p. 196)