Wonder + Commit
Caring, curious mentors create space.
Ellen + Dalia
Ellen is now retired, but in her career in education, she played many roles: teacher, social worker, administrator, and consultant for fellow principals.
She is a deeply curious person, and developed a love for learning about other languages and cultures in high school. She learned to speak Spanish after spending time abroad in high school, majoring in Spanish in college, and then spending time in Spain, Mexico, and Puerto Rico to practice her skills and to immerse herself in other cultures. After college she became a teacher and then a school social worker in Massachusetts. As a bilingual staff member, she connected with a number of students who were recent immigrants to the US, most of whom spoke Spanish. It was in this role that she met Dalia.
Dalia was born in El Salvador and came to the US during high school. She missed home, she missed her father. “I was struggling… everything was hard for newcomers,” including speaking English and learning about American schools. She was also a teenager full of common teenage questions, but far from the people she knew who could help her.
Ellen offered support for Dalia and other newcomer immigrant students. She started to approach them in the cafeteria or they could visit her office in small groups. She stressed that she did not understand Central America or these students’ culture, but tried to bring a humble curiosity to these relationships, and used that as a bridge to learn from the students and their parents: “Kids really appreciate it when you know something about them and their background.” She stressed that growing the connection and relationship was more important than “telling them what to do.”
Dalia recalled that Ellen didn’t approach her in an effort to be her mentor so much as she tried to “create space” for the two of them to connect. Ellen checked in with Dalia, consistently asking her about home life as well as about her goals and dreams for her future. Dalia remembered that Ellen asked about her mother, but also served as a kind of surrogate mother at school at a time when she really needed one, inviting her to have lunch, encouraging her to register for certain classes, or helping her navigate everyday social issues in her new setting. Ellen also looked out for Dalia when they were not together, communicating with teachers, and serving as a kind of hub for teachers’ feedback to relay back to her mentee. Ellen helped Dalia identify when she was doing well in certain classes, and where she might be struggling and need additional support.
These small check-ins added up to an investment that Dalia felt deeply: “She saw something special in me.” Dalia felt this when Ellen invited her to a college fair and encouraged her to apply. Ellen stressed it was Dalia who applied to college, got in, and did the work. Ellen created space, but stressed it was on Dalia to accept her invitation, to “come back and look for support, and then follow through” on the tasks that Ellen gave her.
Ellen soon after created LEA (Latinas en Action), an affinity group that became a gathering space for young, Latina women at the school. Dalia and other young women could connect and seek support from Ellen and from each other. It was not, as Dalia recalled, a formal mentoring program, but it created a space for connections to form. Dalia graduated from high school, and during and after college would sometimes offer support to younger women in the LEA girls’ group.
Dalia’s plans did not include going into education professionally. But after college, when she was unsure of her next steps, Ellen invited her to be a teaching assistant, in part due to her bilingual skills. At the end of that first school year, Ellen advocated for Dalia to be offered an opportunity to become a full-time bilingual social studies teacher, and to receive the support for the additional education and licenses she would need. “She fought for me,” Dalia remembered.
Like applying for college, Ellen stressed it was Dalia who earned her way professionally. Thinking about Dalia and a small number of other students whom she has helped to get started as educators, Ellen stressed “They were forging their own path. They had the strength and the skills.” These were strong young women, they just needed some guidance through the educational systems of applications and licensure: “They didn’t know the structures within which they were working.”
Once they were colleagues, they both remembered that the line between mentor and colleague began to blur. But Dalia still needed support and Ellen still created space for that support early in the mentee’s career. The mentor continued to serve as a hub for feedback, letting Dalia know when and how to improve. One day early in her time as a teacher, Dalia sent an email to an administrator that contained several errors. The administrator came to Ellen with the concerning feedback, and Ellen in turn came back to Dalia with word that both of their reputations were on the line. Dalia was embarrassed. The mentor was gentle, but firm: Dalia needed to make corrections, to seek help with her writing, and to take her time to not to repeat the same mistakes.
After a few years of working together, Dalia moved to a new role in a neighboring district. There, she worked with leaders to create a group similar to LEA, a gathering space for young, Latina women. Dalia said this group never seemed to generate the same momentum. In contrast, another club Dalia started did become a space to connect. An after school club ostensibly focused on justice began with Dalia, as teacher, creating more formal plans, including slides to present. But the club only had one member. That one young woman came regularly, but no other students did. Until Dalia changed the format from presentations to a more informal discussion starting with “What’s on your mind?” The club grew from a single student to 10 young women who came regularly to a space that was informal, almost “playful,” Dalia said. “That was their space.”
For one student, however, there was a greater need. A student whose family had moved to the US from Africa, new to the country and to the school. She needed a person both to care and to offer to answer her many questions, large and small. To help her and her family make their way. She had strength, but needed help to navigate a new system. Dalia did not understand her culture, but was caring and curious.
So this student accepted Dalia’s invitation to regular check-ins and lunches, first in sixth grade and then seventh grade. They ate, and Dalia checked on the student’s overall wellbeing. Dalia checked in with teachers, and served as a hub for feedback. She would compile questions about missing assignments, creating plans with her mentee to complete missing work. She asked about the student’s family, and found ways to help her mentee’s mother with questions and younger brother with school projects, as well as helping the young woman get and stay organized with her own school work. Their lunch meetings became more infrequent as the student moved into eighth grade and left for high school.
Mentoring is often described as a person who knows more helping to guide and to develop a person who knows less. Without question, mentors do offer some support teaching and developing others. Both Ellen and Dalia, however, also stress the importance of acknowledging the strengths and assets that mentees bring, even when they are young people in times of need. They both said that mentors don’t need to show up and present so much as come and make space for relationships to form.
The longtime mentoring researcher and expert Renee Spencer has studied mentoring from a relational perspective, where building trust and connection is a foundational part of mentoring relationships. For Professor Spencer, empathy and companionship help to create what she calls a working alliance, where the mentor and the mentee feel they are both understood, connected, valued, and moving in the same direction1.
Ellen approached Dalia with a level of humble curiosity that acknowledged not just what Dalia needed, but all she brought to the relationship. Dalia, for her part, was open to the support and the feedback, perhaps partly because she was in a period of need and partly because she had a mentor who saw her best qualities and cared about her as a person.
That alliance they created has spanned decades, and how has had an impact for a another generation of students. Working alliances build trust, and help mentees be open and less defensive to feedback. Ellen said she offered guidance and feedback to other students. Not everyone stepped so fully into the space she created.
They were not only forming a relationship. Ellen and Dalia were working on helping Dalia acclimate to school in the US, then on getting to college, and then on getting started professionally. There was work to do beyond their connection. Other researchers on mentoring have described how some mentors offer initial tasks or homework for mentees to complete in the early stages of a mentorship as a kind of test2. Whether or not mentees complete those tasks may come from a combination of mentee readiness when they encounter these tasks, as well as how well the mentor creates that working alliance.
The formal groups that Ellen and Dalia created did not always result in powerful relationships. As she learned from Ellen, Dalia created space, and something special formed for a small group of students and then truly powerful for one student. “When mentoring works, it’s because there is a need, and you’re at the right mind, and you’re open to it,” Dalia recalled, thinking about her own relationship with Ellen as well as her time mentoring her own student. The best connections are “organic” she said, when a caring adult checks in and creates space for a student in need.
So Dalia tries to be for others what her mentor, Ellen, was for her. She remains a deeply curious person, with a love for learning and a sense of caring for others.
Spencer, R. Understanding the Mentoring Process between Adolescents and Adults. Youth Soc. 2006, 37, 287–315.
Also see Gowdy, G., Jones, K., & Griffith, A. N. (2024). Youth Mentoring as a Means of Supporting Mental Health for Minoritized Youth: A Reflection on Three Theoretical Frameworks 20 Years Later. Youth, 4(3), 1211-1223. https://doi.org/10.3390/youth4030076
Ensher, E. A., & Murphy, S. (2005). Power mentoring: How successful mentors and protégés get the most out of their relationships. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Ensher, E. A., & Murphy, S. E. (2011). The mentoring relationship challenges scale: The impact of mentoring stage, type, and gender. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 79(1), 253-266.