The Value of Trusted Colleagues

As I was reading through Gillie Bolton's Reflective Practice over the last few weeks, one section in particular caught my eye. Bolton was talking about mentoring pairs, where instead of finding someone higher in the field to mentor you, you mentor each other professionally and use each other as sounding boards to talk things out (59-62). I loved the idea, but wasn't quite sure what to do about it.

But this week I had a phone call scheduled with a dear friend from school, who's now a respected colleague and has had a variety of teaching experience. I was asking her opinion on a few things, and was surprised at how encouraging it was talking through things with another professional. I can't fathom why I was so surprised though, since we've talked over things before and have said that we both find it encouraging.

So on a whim, I mentioned what I had read to her and asked if she'd like to do something like that, and she was totally game. We've agreed to set up an ongoing email thread for random questions and issues, which I'm thrilled about.

But it's also gotten me thinking about how important it is to have colleagues and how to foster that community. As someone who not only works from home for my non-teaching job, but also teaches as a freelancer, I have exactly two local colleagues right now that I could talk to easily, neither of whom do I get many chances to talk to (and both of whom live an hour away), and it can be isolating. It's something similar to what Helen and Adesola have been talking about to, in trying to create a community of students online, something that's very difficult to do. And I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels this way.

If we don't have it available through school resources, how does everyone feel about finding some kind of resource like a private chatroom or an email thread or a mass skype thread to get some conversations going? Blog comments are great, but they tend to be more one-on-one and it's not as easy to talk to multiple people at once that way. Let me know if you'd be interested in joining something like that (and I'll also try to remember to bring it up in a skype or similar for people who don't see this blog).

And if you've had experience with peer mentoring, let me know your experience in the comments!