The Power of Mentoring
What can older students do to support and lead youger students? One way that Seniors will be directly supporting Freshmen this year is through our Community Leadership Team (CLT). Now in its tenth year, CLT is a peer support program in which older mentors help Ninth Graders with their transition to high school. In advisory groups, two or three Senior leaders facilitate discussions on everything from time management to social interactions to healthy body image. Having gone through a rigorous application and training process, these 23 Seniors are uniquely prepared and excited to lead their groups and take their responsibilities very seriously. At the New Student Orientation, CLT spent more than two hours with the Freshmen, leading activities and helping the new students get acclimated to the school. They will continue to work with these students at least once a month, including next Friday at the Ninth Grade retreat to Mt. Falcon.
The power of this peer-to-peer program has been evident for many years now. The value of having a group of dedicated Seniors as positive mentors is immeasurable. Freshmen often sing the praises of their CLT leaders, noting how these friendly, accessible Seniors have helped them greatly in high school. They see these older students as role models and often say they emulate their behavior. And the benefits of the program actually work both ways; Seniors trained as CLT leaders reinforce their positive images of the school, their role in the community, their leadership skills, and in the end they feel they are giving back to CA in a significant way.
The Department of Education and the Mentoring Resource Center have combined forces to support peer mentoring programs in schools. Among the many benefits of such programs, they note:
- Positive outcomes for both the mentor and the mentee, providing growth and learning opportunities
- Fewer resources required, because mentors are gathered from the student population, compared to if the school had to recruit adult mentors
- Peer relationship building, especially because youth are at a critical point in life where they're looking for relationships, and younger kids in particular are looking for a role model
- Improved transitions from elementary to middle, or middle to high school.
Director of Counseling, Liza Skipwith, who was instrumental in developing the CLT program at CA, concurs with these points and would add:
1) Adolescents generally listen to and talk more with individuals closer to their age, rather than adults.
2) Having a peer support leader to talk to and relate to can often relieve some of the tensions of the teen years for adolescents.
3) Peer facilitation training and the recognition of being in that role increases the self concept of these adolescents as they are recognized as helpers by their own peers.
4) Peer support leaders also receive valuable experiences in the art of facilitating groups and relating to others that can be applied for a lifetime.
I am very appreciative of the hard work already shown by these twenty-three Seniors and the five faculty sponsors who train and support them.
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