A Child’s World (formerly Port Colbourne Co-op), located in Port Colborne, Ontario is in its final stages of launching its newly created plan to develop and sustain a "mentoring culture" within its organization. A Child’s World is a non-profit corporation with a mission to provide quality child care for children of all ages in a loving, warm, nurturing environment. The agency is governed by a volunteer Board of Directors, made up of parent representatives from their twelve child care centres, and interested community members. The agency provides care to over eight hundred children and employs one hundred and forty people. The majority of the agency’s centres are work place centres, providing a child care service to the building’s employees as well as to families in the surrounding community. All programs are unique to their specific community and its’ needs. Parent Advisory groups at each centre play a strong role in setting the direction of the centre.

As a child care organization, A Child’s World is committed to providing a quality child care service to families and children in the Niagara Region. To realize this commitment, the organization recognizes the importance of offering a child care program where the following are present for all those involved in the service ~

• The promotion of trusting, caring and cooperative relationships that respect the worth and uniqueness of the individual;
• Stimulation that encourages growth in the whole person; and
• Settings that are healthy and safe.

A Child’s World believes that to achieve such a child care program for all those involved in their child care organization, it must give priority to creating conditions to optimize its work environments for both their employees, the child care practitioners who care for the children, and for the families who use their child care service. The organization believes that if they can maximize collegial relationships, promote opportunities for continuous staff growth, and support the creation of healthy and friendly work environments, its staff will be empowered to provide high quality care that gives children and families what they need in order to optimize their development.

In 1997, A Child’s World implemented a mentoring program within their organization after engaging in the Partners In Practice Successful Canadian Mentoring Programs pilot project. This project examined mentoring at various stages in a practitioner’s career development and resulted in the articulation of The Partners In Practice Mentoring Model. Incorporating a mentoring program into their organization was motivated by the desire of A Child’s World’s to provide their child care program supervisors with professional and personal growth opportunities and to support the quality of programs being delivered to children and families within their child care programs. A mentoring coordinator was hired to achieve this goal. To provide support to continue to sustain the mentoring program the Board of Directors had to be provided evidence that demonstrated the effectiveness of mentoring. To address this need, the mentoring coordinator approached the Partners In Practice group to explore ways and means to collect data to demonstrate the effectiveness of A Child’s World’s mentoring program.

During meetings with the Partners In Practice consultant it became evident that mentoring was being implemented by A Child’s World as a separate program rather than an incorporation of mentoring within all aspects of the organization’s infrastructure. At that time, the mentoring coordinator was serving as a mentor to approximately eight different protégés. Communication struggles were experienced and the indication was that these challenges would persist. Mentoring was being used as a strategy to intervene and prevent crisis situations within a child care program while also giving opportunity for supervisors to grow through a mentoring relationship. (The organization is hieratical in its structure with supervisors reporting to coordinators in the organization who in turn report to the executive director.) The mentoring coordinator at times was attempting to intervene in situations where supervisors were experiencing performance problems. The mentoring coordinator, not having supervision authority, was challenged with confidentiality issues that were caused by having the mentor and protégé reporting to the same coordinator Both mentor and protégé were responsible to the coordinator for increasing the skills of the protégé. This conflict challenged the mentor in terms of following direction of the coordinator to correct performance challenges and the protégé needing to feel safe in her reflections. With concerns apparent to extend the organization’s coordinators’ learning, the central administration staff (coordinator and executive director) and mentoring coordinator came together to discuss the overall vision of mentoring. At that meeting, acknowledgement was given that for mentoring to truly have an impact on the care provided to children it must be incorporated into the organization’s culture rather than layered on top of the organization’s current program structure.

With this, discussions began with the Partners In Practice group resulting in A Child’s World becoming a pilot for the Partners In Practice Mentoring Model in Early Childhood Care Organizations Workbook project. Since then, (1999) the organization has applied the workbook process and developed and began implementation of a plan to bring a mentoring culture to life within the organization. Intuitively, mentoring made sense and its effectiveness was being observed, but initially the organization hadn’t formalized an implementation plan, solidified what it wanted to achieve from mentoring, or articulated what its vision or values for mentoring were. Two years later, September 2001, A Child’s World is in its final stages of launching its newly created plan to develop and sustain a "mentoring culture" within its organization.

Engaging in the workbook process seemed to reduce the amount of fires that needed to be put out within the organization. This may have been coincidental, however, it is believed that the planning team’s proactive approach and the depth and breadth of reflection elicited from each individual within the group, and the group as a whole, was behind the change. Before any implementation of the plans developed, the process began to stimulate the establishment of a mentoring culture. The administration staff’s perspective and expectations of their child care staff changed early on in the workbook process. Administration staff became more accepting of where each individual practitioner was in their personal and professional development.

The depth and breadth of examination required to complete the workbook process necessitated a series of meetings that did not exceed three to three and one-half hours. At the end of each workbook session, the planning group felt exhausted and tired, and at the same time, affirmed that the organization was doing great things. All those who participated in the workbook process stated very clearly that people cannot expect to complete the workbook and create an implementation and evaluation plan in a three-day session. Establishing a mentoring culture is a comprehensive goal, one that requires support and recognition, relationship building, reflective thinking, and continuous growth, each which require time to take root, explore, grow and develop.

The reason why A Child’s World’s staff provide a quality child care service is that they are committed to healthy child development. The Board of Directors shares this commitment. Parents, children and staff are the organization’s priority. With A Child’s World supporting its practitioners and valuing their contributions, the organization believes that the creation of a mentoring culture will increase quality and produce an excellent standard of care for children and their families. A Child’s World recognizes that their early childhood staff is what have made, and will continue to make, the organization successful. The organization believes that their early childhood staff is the means to achieving their organization’s ends. It holds the philosophy of~ "what goes around comes around in the circle of care ". With this, the synergy and motion that is created by the energy invested in the circle of care causes a ripple effect. The investment A Child’s World makes to their staff creates a ripple effect- to the children, families and ultimately the community and society at large. The staff is the means to the organizations ends. Internal support and value build resiliency in staff. Trusting and believing in staff, standing behind and beside them will increase their resiliency to the negative messages that devalue their contributions to children and families.

Developing a vision and articulating values for mentoring in A Child’s World were two critical pieces to the workbook process. The creation of a vision and articulating values allowed those involved in the process to examine their hopes and dreams for mentoring and disclose individual beliefs and assumptions about the organization and mentoring. The vision and values created provided an objective base from which all decisions were based on throughout the development of the mentoring implementation plan. The process, although lengthy and at times tedious, focused the planning team and promoted the group’s ability to work together to move mentoring forward. Most significantly, the creation of vision and naming and discussion of values encouraged the planning team to treat one another with honor, respect and modestly during the workbook process. A sense of equity was developed and continued to be apparent within the group. Individuals spoke without hesitation and without fear of recrimination. They respected the opinions of one another and built on each other’s insights. When needing clarification, members of the group asked without hesitation for an explanation and/or elaboration.

Much time and energy was spent in reflection. The process encouraged personal reflection in and between meetings. Members would come to the meeting with insights they gained through reflecting on previous work. This reflection generated new and novel ideas to bring back to the group for discussion. The planning committee preferred that the length of time between meetings was limited since it took a great amount of time to reorient the group to the process where they left off in the previous meeting. If the gap between meetings was too large it was difficult to get the momentum started when group reconvened.

Upon completion of the vision section, there was a great sense of accomplishment and satisfaction to have created a vision that would provide clarity to the future direction of mentoring within A Child’s World. The feeling of affirmation and recognition of the excellent efforts and hard work that the organization and its employees contribute to supporting staff growth and programs through mentoring outweighed the amount of hours that this part of the process took. Planning team members acknowledged that a lot of time and energy would have to be contributed to developing a plan to achieve the successful incorporation of mentoring within the organization. Nevertheless, being fully committed to the vision, each participant expressed their motivation and excitement of the benefits that would be realized by actualizing the vision they had just created.

Team members discussed how they would conduct future meetings and who should participate. Suggestions included a two-day retreat or a series of one-day meetings, or monthly three-hour meetings. After discussion it was agreed that because of the energy required to complete the reflective questions, three hours would be the maximum amount of time that could be contributed to ensure the most productive outcome was achieved. Furthermore, although it was agreed that it would be terrific if all staff within the organization could participate, it was concluded that this was an impossible hope given the time commitment and resources that would be needed. It was agreed that at some point within the process additional participants would be recruited including support staff, practitioners, administrators (supervisors), board members, and various community members. For future meetings the financial coordinator was added as a member that would participate in all future meetings believing that her insight and overall interaction within all parts of the organization would be beneficial to the process.

At different times in the planning process, staff of the organization were engaged in various areas of the implementation plan i.e. Myers Briggs Type Indicator Ó training, Work Environment Survey and training, and providing input and feedback at various organizational meetings regarding mentoring activities.

It was at this point in the workbook process that the planning committee of a Child’s World came to the true understanding of the potential impact of mentoring. If mentoring was to be effectively incorporated into the organizations culture it could not be a program. The power that they began to realize of the Partners In Practice Mentoring Model is that its focus is on the people who form the mentoring relationship. They realized that emphasis must be placed on the conditions that allow people to reach their full potential and enable them to practice as true reflective practitioners. Instead of having a mentoring program with some practitioners designated as mentors having superior knowledge and some as proteges who needed superior knowledge and expertise, they saw mentoring as a relationship. They focused on the importance of incorporating the PIP mentoring model’s guiding principles into their organization to create a climate or a culture that would foster mentoring relationships among all those involved in the organization and stimulate reflective practice.

Priority was placed on the organization facilitating the conditions necessary for all those involved in the organization to begin to have a sense of voice, sense of belonging and feel safe in their reflections, needs identified in the Partners In Practice Mentoring Model. It was at this juncture that those things identified as barriers or needs didn’t seem insurmountable. It was realized that if a mentoring culture was created, mentoring relationships would naturally develop rather than seeing the organization as having to create and come up with money to create a new position within the organization to coordinate mentoring.

Opportunities like the Early Childhood Work Environment Survey (ECWES) completed the summer of 2000 and the Myers Briggs Type Indicator Ó (MBTIÓ) Training in April 2001 have been made available to the organization and its staff through this Partners In Practice Workbook project. The Early Childhood Work Environment Survey (ECWES) was recommended and funded as part of the workbook process to measure staff's perceptions about their work environment. The dimensions that are measured in the ECWES are closely related to the Partners In Practice guiding principles of building relationships, continuous growth, and support and recognition. The ECWES gave a picture of how the organization's staff perceived that the organization was demonstrating the Partners In Practice Mentoring Model guiding principles that were adopted by the organization. This information provided insight to the development of the organizations implementation and evaluation plans. As well, the tool gave a baseline measure of the work environment during their planning phase. The ECWES will be used again throughout the implementation of the mentoring plan to evaluate the impact that mentoring is having on the organization.

MBTIÓ training gave each staff the opportunity to identify their own MBTI Ó Type. In addition to the usefulness of MBTI Ó in terms of a matching tool for mentoring pairs, it has been an extremely useful and practical tool for achieving an understanding of the differences that staff encounters in their daily interaction with others. The MBTI Ó provided an indication of how individuals prefer to perceive things, people, ideas and situations and how people prefer to come to conclusions about what has been perceived. The understanding and appreciation of the differences in the way people prefer to function has greatly enhanced the effectiveness of how people work together – whether in a supervisor/staff, peer or personal relationship. The MBTI Ó provided a useful context for increasing personal and professional effectiveness in such areas as communication, problem solving, conflict management, and assignment of work, training, coaching, and increasing team effectiveness. Further training around the MBTI Ó is also being considered.

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Signed, Thankful #1

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Throughout the workbook process, the reflections, insights and evaluation that took place precipitated many changes and refinements to the existing practices within the organization. An example is the implementation of monthly coaching meetings between Staff and Supervisors to promote mentoring relationships and support staff development. At these meetings staff are encouraged to identify their individual strengths, examine areas for which they want to develop and create developmental growth plans for further personal and professional achievements.

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Dear Barb:

Thanks again, Barb

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Beginning September 2001, Supervisors and Assistant Supervisors will engage in a training program provided by Niagara College of Applied Arts and Technology. Supervisors and Assistant Supervisors will engage in training during work hours on a bimonthly basis. This training is designed to equip those involved in the program with the skills necessary to stimulate a mentoring culture within A Child’s World and enabling mentoring relationships to be created. Another step toward the realization of A Child’s World’s vision of mentoring.