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THE ALLEYNIAN 710
Modern mentoring success
ALICK GALVEZ (YEAR 13) LOOKS BACK ON AN INITIATIVE BORN DURING LOCKDOWN AND ROLLED OUT OVER THE PAST TWO YEARS
Like many of my peers, I had a lot of time to think about the upcoming school year during the lockdown of the summer before I started Year 12. I wanted the year to be different from my previous years at Dulwich, and although I was already involved in various extra-curricular activities, I was eager to make a meaningful contribution in the Upper School. While I had a plethora of ideas to choose from, I could not initially decide which would be the most appropriate, and was unsure how to go about achieving these ideas. After some time, I realised I had quite a few friends and peers who were native Spanish speakers, so I decided to do something connected with Spanish. My initial plan was to set up a Spanish Society, organising talks and lectures about the Spanish- speaking world, possibly as a subgroup of the Modern Foreign Languages and Culture Society. This might well have been successful, but it was very similar to other pre-existing societies. Seeking to do something different, something which would contribute more to Spanish at Dulwich, I reached out to my former Spanish teacher, Mr Iltchev, who is also Head of Spanish, and the plan of a mentoring group was born. We decided that it should be aimed at Year 10 pupils starting their GCSE course, but due to Covid, we couldn’t adopt a traditional approach to a mentoring group, as face-to-face sessions could have resulted in complications. Instead, we opted to use Zoom
as our method of communication. Apart from the occasional mentee not showing up, the mentoring group was a major success, with teachers reporting improvement from students involved in our scheme. Now that I look back, the idea of starting a mentoring initiative during a pandemic is laughable, but we were determined to make it work. The mentoring team consisted of Year 12 native speakers: Alex Cogolludo-Blanc, Leandro Gough, Daniel Davies, Miguel Perez Coronel, and me. Each of us agreed to take on two or three mentees, with whom we would spend a break-time session once a week. You would think that a 25-minute session would offer little benefit to struggling Year 10 students, but in fact it provided us with ample time to focus on an aspect of Spanish, for example reading comprehension or translation, while maintaining the attention of the mentees. It had the added benefit of giving the mentees a taste of how the things that they had learned in class could be used, because the sessions, although planned and structured, were informal compared to a teacher talking in the front of the class. The 25 minutes became more like prompted conversations, rather than 25 minutes of taught Spanish. Naturally, the fact that this could not be held face-to-face was not ideal and required increased cooperation and organisation from both mentees and mentors. It was quite odd needing to use
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