Peer Mentoring Essay

Peer Mentoring: The Benefits and Disadvantages of Peer Mentoring in Youth

Currently in Canada, about 42000 youths have mentors through the Big Brothers Big Sisters program and there are still thousands of youth on their waiting list. After learning about how many kids were not able to get mentors, I decided to volunteer with Big Brothers Big sisters as a teen mentor for elementary kids during my last year of highschool. Peer mentoring is not the usual kind of mentoring that people think of. In the conventional type of mentoring, there usually an older individual, one who’s had professional experiences in a certain mentoring field, and an individual seeking these specific services. Peer mentoring is different because the title of the mentor and and the mentee is equal (Holbeche,1996, p.24). The members involved in peer mentoring develope a relationship with one another after either occasional or regular meetings (Holbeche, 1996, p.25). The objective of the relationship is to allow the members to coach each other, help solve

In beginning of my mentoring sessions, my mentee did not talk to anyone else in the program except me. As we did more activities to increase her confidence, such as playing games in groups, she began to talk to more people without me asking her to. Another benefit for the mentee is increased learning and development. At first, my mentor meetings did not always happen because my mentee often did not show up to school on fridays. As the weeks progressed, our coordinator told my mentee that even when she did not show up, I would still come to the school every week. After hearing this, my mentee did not miss another day of mentoring except when she had to. This may not have affected her learning in the hour that she spent with me but because she came to school for the day, participating in her class would have encouraged more