For young people with long-term, multiple professional adults supporting them, or negative past experiences of mentoring, initiating and sustaining the mentoring relationship can be challenging. In this post Specialist Youth Mentor and Trainer, Elaine Thomas explains here mentoring strategy coined 'The Dance'.

In mentoring we build relationships with young people that resemble the ‘dance’ Teresa May engaged in on her visit to Africa in 2018.

This dance begins at the initiation of the relationship and ends once our intent, ground rules, and testing stages of the relationship have been established.

The dance is a fantastic way to develop strong, sustainable, and productive teacher-student relationships. 

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Youth culture, as we experience it today is one of if not the most powerful subculture of society we’ve ever seen. It has changed the way we do everything. There is however one area that remains hindered by old age societal norms; our discourse with young people about their experiences, expectations, values, solutions and recommendations.   

The solution is youth culture; as far-fetched and utopian as it may seem. 

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Mentoring frameworks vary so much that it's often difficult to pin down ‘how’ mentoring should be done and how mentoring programmes ‘should’ be designed.

Surprisingly the X-Factor TV show has a few pointers on mentoring best practices that we can all learn from.

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