Youth need guidance to maximize their potentials, develop in a sound and well-rounded way, and steer clear of trouble. This is especially so nowadays, due to the complexity of today’s world as well as the greater exposure to a variety of influences that advances in communications technology have brought with them. However, familial trends are such that less rather than more guidance might be available through the home or extended family today. Schools have taken on the brunt of providing this guidance through a variety of guidance programs. One way a particular secondary school in Hong Kong provides this guidance is by instituting a school-wide mentoring program, providing each student with a teacher designated as his personal mentor.
While it is true that teachers in Hong Kong have always understood themselves as having a guidance role especially as class tutors for their own classes, and it is also true that mentoring has already been widely used in a variety of youth settings to provide guidance, efforts to combine the two and use teachers as mentors in a formal mentoring program for all the students in the school are less common but also seem to be on the rise. At any rate, research evidence for such programs is lacking and in the context of Hong Kong, virtually non-existent. Questions thus arise as to whether such school-wide, school-based mentoring programs using teachers can actually be successfully put in place; whether they actually have merit when put in place; and if they do have benefits, what kind and what extent of benefits actually accrue, and how might they be maximized.
This case study is an attempt to address the above questions by seeking a deeper understanding of the mentoring program in the particular school. Specifically, it seeks first to clarify what the actual implementation of the mentoring program in the school looks like. Secondly, it seeks to consider how the program can be made more effective by identifying factors that affect the outcomes of such mentoring as well as by uncovering points of leverage specific to the case school.
The research context of this study is in the domain of mentoring literature. At the same time, perspectives from the field of guidance in schools are also given due consideration. As a case study, a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods are used alongside each other and these include in-depth interviews with students and teachers and a survey of the student population of the school at large.
The results show that though the actual implementation may not be as smooth as theorized, the program has already been reaping benefits. The program is also likely to reap even greater benefits if steps are taken to address issues such as clarity of objectives and commitment of staff and if it incorporates certain features of other well-run mentoring programs such as the provision of ongoing training, and program activities to support the development of the mentoring relationship.
The results also confirm that factors commonly expected to be moderators of mentoring effectiveness such as the intensity and quality of the mentor-mentee relationship were indeed also moderators in the school’s program and that factors more specific to the program’s context such as goal-setting and whether the personal tutor was also the class tutor also had significant effects. It further suggested that mentoring the mentors could also be a key part of the equation in the bid to enhance program effectiveness.
Overall, while acknowledging several areas requiring further research, the findings of the study do endorse the case school’s model of a teacher-led school-wide mentoring program for students as an effective guidance strategy which fits well into a whole-school approach to guidance. The study has also been a significant step towards understanding the inner workings and potential difficulties in implementing such mentoring programs and can thus serve as a guide to schools wishing to venture into this area and can contribute to the base of literature regarding such mentoring programs. / published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:HKU/oai:hub.hku.hk:10722/183334 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Chen, I-Lingh, Luke. |
| Publisher | The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) |
| Source Sets | Hong Kong University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | PG_Thesis |
| Source | http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B50176614 |
| Rights | The author retains all proprietary rights, (such as patent rights) and the right to use in future works., Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License |
| Relation | HKU Theses Online (HKUTO) |
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