Mentoring
Ms Montfort

 Introducing Simone Montfort

Note: this profile has to tread a fine line between being vague enough to make sure that it is relevant to everyone's circumstances, and specific enough to have some substance. If one or two details are not plausible, just change them to suit your circumstances, bearing in mind that they should not change the overall "shape" of the profile.

Simone Montfort is in her late twenties, and a junior member of staff in another department in the same Faculty as yourself. She has recently joined the lecturing staff, and she has signed up for the lecturer development programme on the recommendation of her Head of Department. You are her mentor, but since you do not work with her directly, you do not know her very well. 

You have had one previous meeting, at which you discussed what was involving in having a mentor, and found out a little about Simone. After graduating from a prestigious old university and taking a higher degree, she had had enough of the academic life and went to work for a large company, but was the victim of "re-structuring" after two years, when she came here, which is proving to be rather different from her expectations.

She can be quite outspoken and impatient, and you know that she has had some disagreements with colleagues, although they usually blow over fairly quickly. She finds the demands of preparation for her teaching quite a burden, since she does not have a great deal of material to fall back on: still, she thinks that doing this programme is going to be quite easy, because education is not a "real" academic/professional discipline, like her own subject area. She can get frustrated when teaching issues present problems, because they "ought not to", because it's basically simple. You know nothing about her private life.

At your previous meeting, you agreed that Simone would set the agenda for subsequent meetings, raising topics which concern her as she encountered them: so no specific objectives have been set for this session. 

Before "meeting" Simone, spend a few moments thinking about your strategy for working with her.

� James Atherton
13 December 2001

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