Abstract

This issue of Mentoring and Tutoring: Partnership in Learning highlights research from scholars representing Washington, DC, California, Michigan, Washington, Florida, and Pennsylvania. Two articles included in this issue mainly explore the training aspect of becoming a goodmentor. From thementor’s perspective, there are several benefits associated with becoming a mentor. Levinson et al. (1978) stated that mentors attain a sense of satisfaction, fulfillment, and self-rejuvenation as they pass down their accumulated skills and knowledge to young, creative, and energetic proteges. Kram (1985) argued that mentors obtain work-related benefits from their proteges as they provide loyalty that may enhance the mentor’s own work performance. Even though there is only a few reported yet, the costs of the decision to be amentor includementor-menteemutual exploitation, time and energy demands, being backstabbed by opportunistic proteges, and negative reflection on mentor’s competency when proteges perform poorly (Levinson et al., 1978; Halatin & Knotts, 1982; Ragins, 1997). Interestingly, individuals with prior mentoring relationship tend to expect more benefits and fewer costs of assuming a mentoring role; thus, they have a greater willingness to play a mentor role in the future than those lacking experience (Ragins & Scandura, 1999). Becoming a good mentor takes conscious, deliberate efforts and does not emerge naturally from being a nice person. There are several strategies, instructions, and professional knowledge base regarding mentor development. Athanases et al. (2008) explained that there are explicit and implicit curricula of mentor development. The explicit curriculum includes lectures, role-playing, features of materials, conversation protocols, and the implicit curriculum includes the environment, organizational structure, norms, and culture. There is no single way to develop or work best mentor development curriculum or training program, or even not recommended, because it should vary depending on the situated contexts and the characteristics of mentors and mentees. This is the reason scholars should continuously build, monitor, and test a mentor development program and report how it worked. In the article, Tutor Training for Service Learning: Impact on Self-Efficacy Beliefs, Waltz examined the effectiveness of tutor-training on preservice teachers’ content knowledge, tutoring skills, and teaching self-efficacy. The author conducted an analysis of variance and found a statistically significant difference between scores from a pretest and posttest measure of content knowledge, tutoring skills, and teaching self-efficacy. MENTORING & TUTORING: PARTNERSHIP IN LEARNING 2019, VOL. 27, NO. 1, 1–4 https://doi.org/10.1080/13611267.2019.1586304