Marina, I like the new photo of all of you added on the wiki front page! It added a kind of action and life to the page...Great job..

Hi, Buthania. This is Shefali. I am happy you liked the pictures. Good to know that we would be working together. Valerie and Marina are great tio work with!

Hello from Arizona.

Hi from Brazil.

Hello to everyone from Armenia

I meant hello to everyone. I live in Armenia

Hello from Athens, Greece.

Hello all from Aguascalientes, Mexico!

Hello everyone! I am from Suriname where I am a teacher trainer. I am ready to learn to use an online group as well as learn more about mentoring. I would also like to share my hits and misses in the training of teachers.

Curious, when I enter Yahoo Groups to view posts, I receive the following message: "You are not a moderator of the group mentoringTESOL." Is anyone else receiving this message?

Ciao from Italy! I'm happy to be here and to share my experiences with you.

Hello to everyone! I am from Armenia and am looking forward to learning with and from you.

Sorry, but I cannot see what I typed some hours ago

Hello to everyone who has joined our group. Wow! We have members from Arizona, Brazil, Armenia, Greece, Mexico, Surinam, Italy, Argentina, Israel and India. (Hope I did not miss anyone!) I am from India. We look forward to different ideas of mentoring in varied contexts and formats, as we shall be sharing our experiences over these few weeks.
Welcome to the Mentoring Group.

Hi all, I am Evridiki from Turkey ( Greek in origin). Happy to be with you! :)

Hello from Kansas. I am currently teaching here, though I am originally from Russia. I am excited to be a part of this group, share and learn! :)

Welcome, Evridiki and Victoria, to the Mentoring Group. We look forward to a lot of sharing over these few weeks.

Hello everyone! my pleasure to share this space with you, lerning from others and learning about ourselves in every step we make! well' that's my reading of mentoring in a nutshell! I simply love being connected with people from so diffeent places! Shefali, valerie and I, together with laura and gabriel ahve een working together for some years now on mentoring and we hope you willl exand our group!

Hi, I'm Anna and I'm a teacher trainer with a college in Poland. Mentoring is something I'd like to investigate to be better at what I do.
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Hello from Barcelona! I'm Angela and I'm Canadian and completely new to mentoring. I'm looking forward to learning!!

Questions I'll be asking myself throughout the course: 1) When does the mentoring process conclude, if at all? 2) How much of the mentoring process is directive, collaborative, and/or nondirective? and 3) Is it recommended to focus on one individual or a network of individuals for providing a mentorship?

I feel that the mentoring process might be a long lasting one in many life situations. Commonly, the process might conclude when the mentee feels confident enough to handle students, curriculum and methods with efficiency and develops as an independent teacher. I feel much of mentoring is non-directive and collaborative. That is where it differs from the role of the superviser where both are trying to satisfy a professional criteria.

Basing ourselves on the idea that mentoring is both cognitive and social, we have added an online reflection tool to our mentoring process for pre-service teachers. These trainees do an internship at a school. All the interns write about a critical incident they have experienced in class and reflect on their feelings about the facts. They save it in a special WORD file that allows locking of the first person's work and adding text by another. The file is sent to everyone in the same cohort, as well as to the mentors. Everyone adds individual comments and the first person can easily collect the comments and put it into one file to have an overview of everybody's comments. I feel that this process can continue throughout one's career and mentoring in this way does not have to stop.

Having different persons comment on a single experience must be enriching as the same experience can be seen from different perspectives. I guess the mentor would step in if the mentee received conflicting opinions on an experience. This helps to present a more holisitc picture of a learning situation.

You're right. There may be conflicting comments. So we've decided to add a face tot face meeting after everyone has had their say. Most of the time the interns solve the conflicting comments among themselves. The mentor really only steps in occasionally.

Learning to solve the conflicting comments by themselves is a step towards independent problem solving. This also gives the interns an opportunity to collaborate and become interdependent. I have found that when the mentees sit and work on a problem together they often come up with brilliant ideas, I may not have thought of .

Hey There from Ecuador, I'm Priscilla and love to "read" fro mu and want to learn lots about Mentoring