The online Promentors International PMB meeting on March 24, 2022 began with a greetings and informal discussion with Ewa from the University of Lublin on the situation in Lublin as a result of the war and Ukraine and the influx of refugees to Lublin and to Poland. She shared the work and volunteering that her college has initiated to help the refugees in this difficult period of time. The participants then had the pleasure of viewing a short video clip on Promentors journey, processes, goals and events.
The first session of the morning began with Dr. Dalia Emmanuel’s presentation of the highlights, goals and conclusions from the meeting at Beit Berl in February 2022. The session continued with an overview of the meeting of Promentors at Seminar HaKibbutzim which included circles of influences with testimonials of a mentor and Ministry of Education official, a panel discussion of the definition and role of mentors by varied stakeholders and an overview of research on mentoring focusing on principals’ feedback. The next part of the session was an overview presented by Professor Haya Kaplan about the joint meeting of Ksife MIT and Rishon Lezion MIT that reflected the planning stages, partnerships and positive learning experience of this successful event. It showed that although educators from different cultures are different in certain ways, we are essentially all the same. The final part of the first session, Dr. Reuma de Groot and Dr. Bilha Bashan presented the draft issues of a position paper dealing with insights of the project up until this point.
The second session of the day was group work in breakout rooms dealing with the main focuses and insights of Promentors in order to develop and finalize the position document of the project. The topics included promoting learning processes in mentoring courses, accreditation for mentors and mentorships, positioning mentors and mentoring in the Israeli context and organizational change in teachers’ colleges for supporting mentors training. We then had an opportunity to present and reflect on the results of the discussions.
The final part of the day was a discussion of the conference in May at the University of Lublin in Poland which hopefully will be possible considering the difficulties the war and Ukraine and Covid 19 present.
The meeting was informative, collaborative and productive and enjoyed by all participants.
