I’ve previously shared a fair amount of material about how we train and utilize peer mentors – and peer tutors – for ELL students.  You can find those resources at The Best Resources On The Value & Practice Of Having Older Students Mentoring Younger Ones.

For years, students in my IB Theory of Knowledge classes have also served as mentors for ninth-graders – both ELLs and English-proficient students.

Every Thursday, they visit the classroom with their mentee, walk-and-talk with them for ten minutes, then return to our classroom where they complete a short form.  A Lead Peer Mentor student from each class collects the form and returns them to the teacher of the mentees after school.

Here are downloadable copies of Peer Mentor Guidelines, the report form, and a list of “focus questions.”  You’ll see that there is a guideline for how to spend the first five minutes of the visit, and that’s followed by a “focus question” for the week, which mentors first answer to provide a model.

It’s worked pretty well over the years for both mentors and mentees.  Broader research, and our own local studies, have shown that mentors have also benefited academically from doing the activity (see Being A Mentor At Our School May Have Resulted In Improved Grades For The…Mentors).

Please look over the materials and offer any suggestions you might have on how to make them better….