SPRINT Mentor Accreditation

SPRINT Mentor accreditation continues to be founded on Don Schon’s concept of the Reflective Practitioner. For Schon, professional competence consists of 3 core elements. For the purpose of gaining accreditation at the higher level a fourth competence – Mentoring - is added to the existing taxonomy:

• Autonomy: the ability to act independently and to take responsibility
• Improvisation (reflection-in-action): adapting one’s practice to the contingencies of the work in hand
• Learning (reflection-on-action): looking back critically on how one’s practice could be improved
• Mentoring the ability to act as tutor and guide to others involved in SPRINT activity.

Mentor accreditation therefore continues to be:

• Practice-based: the assessment is based on actual SPRINT mentoring experience not purely theoretical knowledge;
• Flexible: it should accommodate a range of profiles of experience, recognising that opportunities differ in different organisations;
• Simple: completion should not be onerous but, by definition, will be more expansive than the practitioner award (5 to 10 days work) and should be couched primarily in non-academic language;
• Personally useful: completion should stimulate critical insights and personal learning;
• Communally useful: knowledge should be garnered that will be of value to the whole SPRINT community.

The Mentor accreditation consists of two parts:

Go to Part 1

Go to Part 2