There are various forms of peer mentoring, including one approach that sees both parties help and advise one another, rather than assuming traditional mentee and mentor roles.
This approach guides our peer development groups in the Hampshire Solent area.These are smalls group of people (typically 4-8) who have a common issue or learning requirement.They commit to meeting regularly to share and help each other respond to issues, problems or opportunities to help one another.
The South East Museums Development Programme supports peer learning activities by identifying and brokering the connections, offering skills development on group work, and providing a small amount of funding for schemes. We teach people a simple technique based on an approach called Action Learning, which they can use to structure their conversations. We also encourage a number of group learning activities such as study visits and joint projects.
Shared goals
We support around 100 museums in the Hampshire Solent region alone and many more across the South East, so are uniquely positioned to matchmake people who share common goals and can learn from one another. It can be like finding a needle in a haystack for a museum professional to find the right learning partners.
It is important for people to have a shared focus. We recruit people with a common interest and then support them to do more work to tightly define what their common goals are.
Participants have to be genuinely up for learning, good listeners, and curious about other people’s stories. They need to have enough in common to be able to find relevance in each other people's issues, but diverse enough to offer different perspectives.
Commitment
If some people turn up and others don’t or some are less willing than others to share their own insights or challenges, participants can feel that the exchange is unfair and the relationship isn’t valued. These factors have an negative impact on the level of learning.
We make the expected level of time input very clear and aim to only recruit people to our programme who demonstrate a strong commitment to the process.
People need to feel able to share their workplace challenges and feel safe about doing so. This is why we invest time at the launch events drawing up group agreements, which cover confidentiality among other things.
Although we have deliberately set up our peer development groups to be self-facilitated we are always on hand to help out. We might signpost a group to external expertise or help to resolve a conflict between group members.
Key benefits
Peer-to-peer mentoring helps to build networks. Museums can be quite insular and this is a great way to build connections between them. Having a group means there is more potential for ideas and collaborative projects to develop.
Participants are exposed to a wider range of perspectives and experiences. We encourage them to visit the museums of all group members, so they get to see a range of different practice in the sector.
Each individual in the group is on a level playing field, so there is less sense that one is an expert and the other receives the expertise. This can be challenging, especially if some group members have much more experience and expertise than others.
These people may feel that they are only giving and not getting enough out of the programme. We aim to help groups to address this kind of imbalance by suggesting learning techniques such as open questioning that give less experienced members a useful role in helping more experienced members to think through their issues.
Lucy Marder, cultural partnerships officer, South East Museum Development Programme
This approach guides our peer development groups in the Hampshire Solent area.These are smalls group of people (typically 4-8) who have a common issue or learning requirement.They commit to meeting regularly to share and help each other respond to issues, problems or opportunities to help one another.
The South East Museums Development Programme supports peer learning activities by identifying and brokering the connections, offering skills development on group work, and providing a small amount of funding for schemes. We teach people a simple technique based on an approach called Action Learning, which they can use to structure their conversations. We also encourage a number of group learning activities such as study visits and joint projects.
Shared goals
We support around 100 museums in the Hampshire Solent region alone and many more across the South East, so are uniquely positioned to matchmake people who share common goals and can learn from one another. It can be like finding a needle in a haystack for a museum professional to find the right learning partners.
It is important for people to have a shared focus. We recruit people with a common interest and then support them to do more work to tightly define what their common goals are.
Participants have to be genuinely up for learning, good listeners, and curious about other people’s stories. They need to have enough in common to be able to find relevance in each other people's issues, but diverse enough to offer different perspectives.
Commitment
If some people turn up and others don’t or some are less willing than others to share their own insights or challenges, participants can feel that the exchange is unfair and the relationship isn’t valued. These factors have an negative impact on the level of learning.
We make the expected level of time input very clear and aim to only recruit people to our programme who demonstrate a strong commitment to the process.
People need to feel able to share their workplace challenges and feel safe about doing so. This is why we invest time at the launch events drawing up group agreements, which cover confidentiality among other things.
Although we have deliberately set up our peer development groups to be self-facilitated we are always on hand to help out. We might signpost a group to external expertise or help to resolve a conflict between group members.
Key benefits
Peer-to-peer mentoring helps to build networks. Museums can be quite insular and this is a great way to build connections between them. Having a group means there is more potential for ideas and collaborative projects to develop.
Participants are exposed to a wider range of perspectives and experiences. We encourage them to visit the museums of all group members, so they get to see a range of different practice in the sector.
Each individual in the group is on a level playing field, so there is less sense that one is an expert and the other receives the expertise. This can be challenging, especially if some group members have much more experience and expertise than others.
These people may feel that they are only giving and not getting enough out of the programme. We aim to help groups to address this kind of imbalance by suggesting learning techniques such as open questioning that give less experienced members a useful role in helping more experienced members to think through their issues.
Lucy Marder, cultural partnerships officer, South East Museum Development Programme