639 Mentoring Blog

When I look back at my original vision I posted in January, it makes me kind of sad. I can feel my excitement as I read through what I thought would unfold, but it hasn't. As I wrote in my last blog about trying to get a group of people to do something, I feel like I'm herding wild dogs or something. After I realized the group did not seem to be latching on to the virtual identity, I've thought of several other changes I could make. I think because the group is so big, that each person feels like they blend into the group and there is a sense of anonymity. In this case, I don't think that is good. When we talked about one on one mentoring, we discussed setting up commitments and expectations as well as two engaged learners. Although I realized this was important for a group, I don't know that I fully realized how to do this with a group. The group I worked with existed prior to mentoring as CoP (although they would not recognize this term) so my goal was to help them with their virtual identity. The difficult part was building value into this. I believed they saw the value but in hindsight, I'm not sure they did.