The Mentoring Process in Professional Nursing Research Paper

The Mentoring Process in Professional Nursing - Research Paper Example Those educationists who gained formal education to conduct the role of educating nursing students are experiencing various problems. Those who have attained the role of being a faculty member in the profession of nursing are expected to figure out complex issues experienced by the system of health care and to help graduates prepare for being able to analyze and make decisions for situations that are novel to them and these faculty members are even responsible for making the students ready to accept and facilitate change. These members of the faculty are even required to take the role of researchers, promote the profession and even provide their services to the institutions and health care settings they are associated with. A nurse educator has to fit in various roles and the nurse educators are not ready to provide services for all these roles and it is becoming really hard for them to balance their career and their lives in such complex situations. Body The concept of mentoring is a renowned one and used in almost every field to aid individuals to adapt new roles with the assistance of socialization. The conventional relationship between a mentor and his protege used to be of a kind in which the mentor used to provide the pathway and the guidance to the protege and the protege used to follow those methods and guidelines to learn, the relationship between these two individuals used to be supportive in nature. Roche states that those individuals who are able to learn through this method experience great success in career and at a very early age they start working at the management level of the organization. This type of relation ship is very renowned but this type of relationship is not the only relationship that exists between a mentor and mentee. Other methods of mentoring include peer mentoring, where nursing faculty who are at the same stage of their career and work at the same hierarchical level, use their information to assist each other (Grossman, 2012, p .16). Another method of mentoring is recognized as Co-mentoring, in this kind of mentoring program, the teacher and the student both participate equally; the teacher conducts the job of teaching as well as listening (Grossman, 2012, p.16). These two mentoring processes rely heavily on communication and empowering of student and teacher. According to Boice, the new members of the faculty of the profession of nursing experience diminished support from the peer members and this support helps them in eliminating the feeling of isolation they experience in their everyday lives (Utley, 2010, p.338). Boice further states that co-mentoring and peer mentoring are mentoring techniques that does not only benefit the new members of the faculty; it even benefits the experienced ones (Utley, 2010, p.338). The involvement of the new faculty members to the mentoring process is of high benefits because these members bring in new ideas and challenges that the experienced ones might be unaware of. The process of peer mentoring recognizes the fact that even the newer members of the faculty have a lot of information and experience to share and when they participate they feel important and are able to address their issues (Jokelainen, 2011). All the three models of mentoring, collaborative, peer and traditional mentoring process are of great value and none of them can be recognized as obsolete. The base of any mentoring process is communication with other faculty members and sharing of ideas and