Music Mentoring

"Mentoring is a developmental partnership through which one person shares knowledge, skills, information and perspective to foster the artistic and professional growth of someone else."

Throughout my five years in music education, I’ve noticed a number of trends come and go. But one trend that has remained and indeed continues to grow, is that of mentoring.

Initially adopted in the commercial sector, mentoring has become regarded as one of the most effective ways of developing people, albeit one of the most expensive.

It has been my pleasure to work on a number of mentoring projects, including Youth Music’s ‘Step Up Your Game’. Helping the young mentees develop and grow, not just musically but personally too, has been one of most rewarding aspects my role to date.

A mentee may want you to tell them what to do or give them the answers, but remember this is not what mentoring is about. Sure, that’s the easy option, but the most valuable thing you can do as a mentor is give your mentee the tools and techniques to solve, change and develop things for themselves.

“The mentor’s role is to guide the mentee to look at a variety of options and consider alternative courses of action in order to solve problems for themselves, rather than to give them answers or provide solutions.”

Here’s some of the qualities you would expect to see in a music mentor: • Experience and or ability to relate well to young people • Sensitive to cultural diversity • Open to continue learning and self development • Able to work in a non-judgmental manner and commitment to Equal Opportunities • Excellent listening and communication skills • Able to commit to regular meetings with young person • Able to commit to length of project • Able to commit with the monitoring requirements of the project. • A recognised musical skill relevant to young people

Being a mentor may require a change in your usual personal approach. Definitely in my case. I’m the sort of person who likes to get to the bottom of things straight away, find the solution, bish-bash-bosh, job done, move on. But here’s the important bit, the mentoring relationship isn’t about me and it’s not about you, it’s about the mentee and their approach may be completely different – but that’s not to say, with the right tools and questioning techniques, you cannot be an effective mentor for that person.

To help you with this, there are numerous resources to be found through a quick google search, or even better, there’s training available. For beginner level mentors, I would recommend a free half-day course run by http://getmentoring.org/.

And for those looking to delve further, you can’t do much better than some of the courses run by MCH training. The emotional intelligence training, which looks at what makes people act the way they do and mentoring in detail, is particularly good.

To be an effective mentor – and to help you evaluate your practice, it is also important to keep track of the progress your mentee is making.

To help you with this, I have uploaded a star diagram that we here at Brighter Sound use. You can download this here (click in the middle where it says 'download from sendspace'). The idea with this is to have your mentee fill it out at the start of your relationship, in the middle – so you can monitor progress, and then again at the end… The notes on the document explain how to do this.

Also, because I’m feeling particularly generous today, I’ve also uploaded our mentoring guide here! This should give you plenty of food for thought…

If you think I may be able to help you in any other way in relation to this, please do ask questions in the comments below…