induction developments

Hi Kirk

sorry I have let the updates drift again, no doubt we will have plenty of time to have a good catch up when we get to NWMS. I just wanted to let you know where we are at:

We have completed the four induction sessions for new mentors; I will be running a few one to one inductions next week for mentors that have just been appointed or were unable to attend the sessions for whatever reason. I am starting an evaluation of the process of the inductions at the moment and will be continuing it before coming over. Then perhaps we will be able to discuss how we can develop this training/induction/application process for future years when we are over.

Just briefly to give you an idea of the things we are looking at. The first thing that is becoming apparent is that staff partners need to be much more involved with the scheme than they seem to have allowed for or anticipated. The second thing is that the induction sessions might be much more effective if seen as a chance to plan projects with supervision from the StAMP team, it might be an idea for us to try and create an exciting collaborative productive environment, a project laboratory when people can think about where they can best use added support and how best to deliver that support.

Looking forward to working with you again

Luke

Why Evaluate?

These are just some rough ideas and points on why it will be useful to evaluate the progression of the mentoring project. We can use these ideas in order to aid with the de,ivery of the findings when we have more statsitics and data that we can all assess.

Why Evaluate?

Management can improve its decision-making, and staff and volunteers will appreciate the value of the work that they do and understand how they can make further improvements. Once the immediate reporting back has taken place, make sure that dates are set for action so that impetus and enthusiasm are not lost.

The evaluation can provide decision-makers with knowledge and information to make informed choices. Your evaluation should show which parts of the project are working, for what people and in what circumstances, and provide a warning if something is going wrong. These are key findings and you need to decide what action to take. Is extra funding needed? Are new activities required? Do staff or students need extra training or skills?

The evaluation will also provide information for your next year plan. It will help you to review your objectives. Are your services or activities the right ones to achieve the intended change or benefits? If the project has brought about some unexpected results, how will you take those into account in future planning? You may need to gather more information about the outside world, for example local strategies and other service provision, before making decisions about changing services.

The evaluation may give you clearer information about who is using your services, about your members, or who you are reaching with your information or publicity. This will help you to think more carefully about who you are not reaching. If the findings point out areas where need is greatest or least served, you may need to consider redefining your target group. You may need to carry out more publicity or establish new contacts and networks. It may be that you need to follow up your evaluation with a more in-depth needs analysis.

Your evaluation will also allow you to review your targets for outputs and outcomes. If you have not met certain targets, or if you have exceeded them, then you should be able to set this against what you now know about the capacity of the project and the performance of other agencies. Your evidence should be strong enough to show if there were good reasons for a lower than expected performance, whether targets were set realistically and whether you should adjust them.

Use the lessons learnt about what you could do better, or differently, in your operational planning. Do you need to:

• change the way the project is managed?
• reallocate resources?
• expand or change direction?

Staff and volunteers are under pressure in their daily work routines and will need motivation to use evaluation findings and make changes. Work towards changing the culture of the organisation, so that people are receptive to new ideas and challenging feedback.

Update

Hi Luke,
So basically what i've been doing all day is reading the heck out of how people evaluate such processes, Theres some useful stuff that i found in which we could also use in our project.... I will however, continue to look in to this what other methods we could use and how we could adapt them to our project, i've also sent you the timetable, finished it of.

Jamie has e-mailed about moodle page.

I've also been coming up with some rough questions we can ask mentor of the weeks for the sake of the interviews and the montage video at the end.

Interview mentor of the week – using Oliver’s cool interview machine

Q. What do you feel you have achieved throughout the process so far?

Q. What difficulties have you came across?

Q, Do you feel that you have helped students?

Q. What resources have you used?

Q. What are you most proud of?

Q. Is there anything that you can think of that can improve the scheme?

By doing this we can gain evidence as to whether or not the scheme is working. We can also liaise with the mentors to find out what problems may of occurred. By creating video interviews it will also allow the mentors to have something to keep at the end of the project, something to prove the work that they’ve done. We then plan on creating a video montage from all of the individual interviews and other footage that we may of gained throughout the process.

Make a video montage for the mentor of the year awards, a presentation with the statistics from our evaluations supported by our students explaining the benefits.  Need to get across a unity with the university, and signs of improvement of progression retention and success.

Focus group mentors to discuss how the process has gone, it’ll will provide us with a relax environment where all mentors can discuss freely about what worked and what didn’t work.

Questionnaires will allow us to gain quick statistical information

Interviews will provide us with in depth scenarios of what worked particularly well and what didn’t

Grade Statistics, I am unaware whether or not we would be able to access the information of how grades have improved or not improved in the past semester.

Ethnography will allow us to observe mentoring session and allow us to analyse in depth detail about what is happening or what needs changing.

Rating system, get all mentors to rate the STAMP scheme and possibly get mentors to ask mentees to rate them 

Create case study’s of mentors how student employment has benefitted them 

Evaluation for Training Sessions: 30th March and 3rd April 2012

Kirk, thanks for your reply and feedback on our work. it has really helped having another perspective for some constructive criticism. I hope your managing to balance your hectic work life! I look forward to seeing you again in July.

The following is an evaluation I have created over the first two training sessions, which I think went relatively well,

30^th March

I feel the first academic mentor session went well. I think that it was inevitable to have some areas that we needed to improve on or include. A particular thing I found interesting was the concern over mentors recruiting their mentees, which is something we never really considered. I think for future sessions we must consider addressing these issues:

-         Better time management and structure, we need to plan out when and who’s saying what especially when we add slides because no one will know when their slide comes up.

-         Less pressure on Luke to do most of the speaking.

-        Clearer advice and guidelines on recruiting mentees, and confirmation of every mentors staff partner.

-        Group Brainstorming session: instead of writing down their ideas on paper, get them to present their thoughts in front of the group. .

-        Icebreaker activity – sit with everyone, interact with the group more.

-        Confirm that both student services AND Centre for Academic Success will be turning up.

-        More information about the blog

-        I think their needs to perhaps be apart where mentors are given advice or techniques to draw in mentees especially because it is a difficult time around exam period.

-         My confidence in speaking to a large group made me struggle to express myself clearly.

I do feel that several aspects of the induction went according to plan:

-        The introduction helped to settle the awkward atmosphere of no-one knowing each other.

-        Mentors were clearly sold the high number of benefits that being involved in the scheme can offer.

-       Mentors were clearly addressed on the ways in which they must submit their work and be assessed.

-        Mentors were provided with techniques to recognise their skills and use them for employment purposes.

-         They knew how they would be rewarded e.g. mentor of the week and mentor of the year. Good incentive.

-       We worked well as a team, helping each other out when we struggled.

-        We improvised well when CAS didn’t show up. Perhaps we could get the young lady who worked there to turn up and say a few words instead, she might be more reliable.

-      I think the videos are a good touch, because it makes the mentors relax in a present, like we are actually human instead of presenting robots!!

3rd April

This session I felt went remarkably better than the first, I think the smaller group number and more intimate and in depth ice breaker and brainstorming activity settled not only the mentors but the three of us presenting also. A notable difference was the quality of our presentation, since we evaluated our first session and added bits in that we needed after it, Such as tips for the mentees on what to do next.

Several problems again came up:

-         Mentors still were not clear on who their member of staff was that was supervising them.

-         Mentors still weren’t sure on how to recruit their mentees, their biggest worry. Perhaps include slides on - what they need to do to recruit their mentees.

-         Need ss and CAS to be committed and turn up to every session to do their bit.

-         Mentors, some in particular were not clear on what to do in their sessions, e.g. some said things such as talking about football. Perhaps a section on what to do in their sessions.

-        Maybe take some pressure of Luke, since he was doing a lot of the talking, however he is the best speaker and giving him the key point s to do aided in the clear expression of what the mentors needed to be doing.

-        Again ss and CAS were not there, I think their presence is vital for the mentors.

There were also many things that were improved from the first:

-        Mentors were given advice on ‘what is next’ after the session, so they had steps in which to prepare. -- ---- Advice such as networking themselves in lectures was given.

-         his also helped to recruit the mentees, which again was an issue that was raised.

-        We were able to express what we meant clearly, because it was a more comfortable atmosphere.

-        The group brainstorm and icebreaker were a lot better. More quality, the icebreaker activity with the pitch filming was a good idea, which we can use as a source of evaluation for the mentors.

-        The brainstorming session was also good, since we already knew the benefits we sat with the group and helped them come up with the ideas, instead of them just thinking of stuff by themselves and presenting it, followed by us asserting it again, saved time.

Summary

Overall I do feel that the sessions went well. The mentors were given a clear indication of what is expected of them throughout the scheme.  I think the introduction activities are a key part of the training session because they create an active atmosphere, which is beneficial for when we talk for a longer period of time they will be more likely to listen after their brains are engaged.  I think just in case the mentors need re-assurance we should make our presentation available online, since a hard copy of the handbook may be forgotten if the mentor ever goes to a session, whereas if the mentor is at University running a session the internet is readily available. I think the main thing that needs to be addressed is how the mentors gain mentees, since there is a lot of work still to be done on their side there may be a number of things we can to help to help matters improve and quicken. There was an idea in the conference at York to let mentees also sign up to the scheme, and from that collection they would be asked to take a survey. This would contain information on their hobbies, religion, age, gender. These would be allocated to the mentors, who would also fill out their own survey with the same information being asked of them. A particular component we were told that was vital was age, since younger people felt intimidated by people that were significantly older, and people that were mature students felt a low level of connection with younger people. Who most likely would not have kids etc.? I think this is a possible solution for mentors to gain mentees, to let mentees sign up voluntarily who wanted to be mentored and then were allocated to our mentors. As discussed with Melissa, we felt that in regards to mentors and their lack of knowledge over their staff supervisors, which they should perhaps make their own efforts to gain contact. Since it requires minimal effort and will show signs of initiative and passion towards carrying out the project. I also feel that maybe I and Melissa should talk for 5 minutes or so instead of Luke talking for long periods of time, just for an equal balance of pressure on us all.

Evaluation of inductions

Evaluation of Training Days - 30^th March

Reflecting back on the very first training session on 30^th March, it’s clear that there were issues that needed to be resolved, confidence that needed to be worked upon and question’s that needed specific answers.

Considering it was the first training session, it did go well, it’s inevitable that there were always going to be difficulties in the first session but despite those it went quite smoothly.

Some of the issue that I believe we need to work on as a team are:

-       Knowing the next steps for mentors, how they recruit mentees and who their staff partners are.

-       Time keeping of how long activities should last

-       Interact with the mentors more

-       Get the mentors to present their findings themselves

-       Spelling mistakes on the slide show

Some of the issues I believe I personally need to work on are:

-       My confidence to speak out loud in front of people

-       My ability to speak with out reading it of the sheet

There are many things that I felt went very well also and this is where we as team came out on top some of these are:

-       Intervals where either myself or one of the other speakers went blank not knowing what to say, at that point we would jump in and help out.

-       Improvising when Centre of academic success never showed up

-       Icebreaker worked very well as it got people talking

-       Presentation flowed very well, we were organised, knowing which slides we were going to present

The things I personally feel we need to do to make future sessions more beneficial are being more prepared with their questions about mentee recruitment and staff partners. The only other thing I feel needs changing is the amount in which Luke Nagle has to present I feel that it will benefit myself and Jamie if we took more control within the sessions.

3^rd April

Reflecting back on the second training session on 3^rd April, it was clear that many of the issues that were addressed after first one had been resolved, however, there were still a few things that still needed clarifying.

With regards to things that we still need to work on are:

-       Uncertainty about how they were going to recruit mentees

-       Uncertainty about who their staff partners were

-       Myself and Jamie need to start taking more control over the sessions

With regards to how I performed during this second session I feel that my confidence improved, I wasn’t as nervous as the I was for the session before, this may be because there wasn’t as many mentors watching in this session. I also managed to improvise with my speech without having to look at the sheet of paper I had prepared; this did however, made me stumble on my words a few times. Practice however, will make it better over time.

The things that work particularly well during this induction were:

-       The time length of the session seemed much better, it never dragged on quite as much

-       Engaging and interacting with the mentors

-       As a team we showed much more confidence in our presenting

-       Able to answer some questions better then we had done in the previous session.

When comparing the first session to the second one, its clear of what changes had been made and how it had effected the induction as a whole. The main thing I feel that improved was our confidence and this in effect made everything a lot smoother.

Next Steps

To make our next session ever more of a success I feel that we need to continue engaging with the mentors, as I feel it’s a more effective way of them learning, over us talking at them constantly, I also believe that myself and Jamie should undertake more control throughout the sessions. With regards to the questions about how to recruit mentees and how to find out who their staff partners are I believe there are many things that they and we could do.

Recruiting Mentees

-       Go in to lectures, tell the students about themselves and their projects

-       E-mail lecturers to let them know about the projects

-       Put up posters

-       Generic E-mail

-       Advertisement on Moodle or Icity

However, with regards to staff partners I believe that its important that the mentors, contact their head of faculty themselves to show initiative. Luke Millard could also send out a generic E-mail to all faculties as a warning as such that mentors are unsure about whom their staff partners are so they’d be prepared for when the mentors E-mail them themselves.