Input provided by Serkan Tezkel, Social Entrepreneur and Mentor Coach from Germany

The student lab at Mentoring Europe has collected inputs from one of our guests who joined the EMS 2022 and has provided inputs on the workshops he attended throughout the three-day summit. For this blog post, he has summarised the workshop session Quality in Peer Mentoring Projects in the times of pandemic and beyond.

Organisation: KWB, DE

Facilitator/s: Dr. Alexei Medvedev

We have focused primarily on the activities of school mentors and the Koordinierungsstelle Weiterbildung und Beschäftigung e. V. (KWB)

“School Mentors – Hand in Hand for Strong Schools” is a joint project in which KWB and other partners support Hamburg schools in setting up their own mentoring program. To do this, KWB trains students, parents and external volunteers to become school mentors. So far, they have worked with about 40 Hamburg schools. KWB focuses on qualifying children, families, volunteers and project coordinators with their training and development activities.

Teachers are trained and coached to become school mentor coordinators. The school mentors support their mentees in everyday school life, learning or reading.

During the pandemic, they used a reflection model. It helped them identify or improve opportunities for action. This model includes three questions to answer: What? What then? What now? With this model, they were able to pursue their mentoring activities with new perspectives.

In a discussion section, we tried to implement this model. In small groups, we focused on improving different perspectives of our mentoring programs. Participants were productive in developing new perspectives for their mentoring programs.