The Mentoring Programme at ISD

Everyone Deserves a Mentor

Our mentoring programme at ISD is all about helping and supporting individuals fulfil their potential. Everyday life can present many kinds of challenges and we can all benefit from being supported to see these challenges from another perspective, to make sense of them and to tackle them in order to achieve our goals in life.

Mentoring can support diverse objectives such as:

• Social integration
• Organisation and stress management
• Independence and self-reliance in one’s learning process
• Communication skills, self-confidence and self-esteem building
• Nurturing an interest or talent
• Changing a behavioural approach

How does it work?

Each mentoring programme contains sub-programmes and, depending on the specific objective(s), mentoring can take the following paths:

Student mentoring

• Supporting students to achieve their potential by identifying challenges, setting goals and working together to achieve these goals. This can be achieved either by matching a student mentee to student mentor (peer mentoring) or by matching a student mentee to adult mentor.

Student transition mentoring

• Supporting new students on arrival throughout the year. This can be offered in the mentee’s mother tongue.
• Supporting non-native English speaking students arriving at the beginning of the school term. This is offered in the mentee’s mother tongue.
• Supporting a student in the process of moving on to a new school and a new country (exit mentoring).

Mentoring workshops

• Offering monthly workshops to parents, mentors, interested faculty and staff members. Those can take on a range of topics like supporting young people to fulfil their potential, managing transitions, self-esteem/confidence building, stress & management skills, the prevention and mastering of anxiety, etc.

Inclusion programme

• Offering an after-school games club for students entering ISD later in the school year to more quickly build relationships within their new environment.

Our Mentoring Coordinator, Dr. Nicola Magnusson, meets mentees for weekly one-to-one sessions or carefully matches a student in need of mentoring to a peer or adult mentor. Our mentors are trained to use the most appropriate approach in order to support the mentee in meeting their specific goals. In addition to prior training, mentors are supported throughout the mentoring process.

Mentoring is a powerful tool that can be a support service in its own right or may be used to further support a mentee who is already receiving other forms of educational or psychological intervention.