Building agency and employability skills in high school students through one on one mentoring.

Each one, Mentor one

1st generation high school students struggle with education due to a lack of resources, personalized support, and a learning environment. Claylab connects them virtually 1:1 with Mentors (volunteers) based on their interests. Mentors, backed by our carefully designed curriculum, support students with setting goals, acting on them, and owning the process of learning. Thus, making them future-ready.

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Overview

Information on this page is provided by the innovator and has not been evaluated by HundrED.

Web presence

2020

Established

1K

Children

1

Countries

Target group

Students upper

Updated

May 2023

Students will learn to set goals, act, & reflect on them, thus learning to adapt to the evolving professional world. Practicing essential skills like communication, critical thinking, collaboration, etc. will enable students to excel in any field. Mentor's motivation to make a difference inspires students to do the same and become active and informed learners, leaders, and citizens.

About the innovation

Why did you create this innovation?

India has more than 10 million 1st generation high school students every year. Various reports have highlighted their lack of awareness, poor level of learning, and poor employability skills. All 3 co-founders of Claylab joined Teach For India Fellowship and observed the same in their students and started Claylab to ensure that these students become a quality demographic dividend for the country.

What does your innovation look like in practice?

In large group sessions for life skills or career awareness, in school, only 20-30% of students could actively learn and participate because all students have unique backgrounds, needs, and aspirations. Therefore we went ahead with the one on one Mentorship model which is more personalized and year-long support for 1st generation high school students. Now, with the same curriculum, up to 60-70% of students could actively learn and participate.
Our Mentors (volunteers) are supported by our Mentorship curriculum and a team of Super Mentors. The Super Mentors themselves have been Mentors with us in the past. Leveraging our curriculum, each Mentor-Mentee pair interacts virtually and together completes 60 lessons in a year with 1 goal and 2-3 hours of learning every week.
Last year, we could see that 75% of our students exhibited self-learning skills and 80% had developed at least 2 employability skills. 85% of Mentees felt empowered to make better choices with the help of mentors.

How has it been spreading?

We started a pilot with almost 60 students in 2020-21 and 150 students in 2021-22. That gave us the confidence to scale it up and so we went ahead with onboarding almost 700 students supported by 700 Mentors (volunteers) for 2022-23 from 3 different states of India, Delhi, Gujarat (Ahmedabad), and Maharashtra (Mumbai). Almost 75% of our students completed the program along with a retention rate of 82% among Mentors. Almost 70% of the Mentors recommended us to their family and friends for a satisfying volunteering experience.
Now, we are planning to support 1000 students for 2023-24 and 3000 students for 2024-25. We have also been able to partner up with almost 4-5 other Nonprofits including Teach For India’s 2 city teams to support their students through our Mentorship program.

If I want to try it, what should I do?

For more information visit https://linktr.ee/claylabeducation or write to us at claylabeducation@gmail.com
Steps:
1. Design & contextualize the mentorship curriculum
2. Build a team of Program Coordinators (volunteers)
3. Select & onboard Mentors (volunteers)
4. Orient & onboard Mentees (students)
5. Program Coordinators help the Mentor-Mentee start the learning journey
6. Collect regular feedback

Media

Post | Feed | LinkedIn

Claylab Education Foundation on Instagram: "At Claylab we are always trying to upgrade our teaching methods and provisions for our students to give them the support they need. But sometimes students aren't able to reach out to us. Keeping that in mi

Post | Feed | LinkedIn

Posts created by our volunteers for orientation of Mentors

Monthly celebrations of the most active pairs

Visit to the schools for onboarding students (Mentees)

Implementation steps

Design the curriculum

The mentorship curriculum should have the following characteristics:
1. It should give a framework to Mentors to have a planned mentoring journey rather than random conversations with the Mentees 2. The content of the curriculum should be based on the needs and aspirations of the students and should have examples related to their lives 3. The journey for the students for the entire year can be divided into 4 quarterly modules to provide space for them to reflect on learnings

Build a team of Program coordinators

1. Program Coordinators are primarily current Mentors managing 15 other Mentors. An employee manages the team of Program Coordinators.
2. The prime responsibility of Program Coordinators is to keep Mentors motivated and committed to the cause.
3. Program Coordinators conduct weekly one-on-one catch-ups with their assigned Mentors to discuss progress. They conduct Monthly Learning Circles to keep the Mentors connected as a community.

Onboard the Mentors

1. The selection process of Mentors should ensure that all the Mentors/Mentor applicants have clarity about the purpose of the program
2. They should understand the importance of discipline, ownership, and values they need to work with
3. A quick background check should also be done for the Mentors to ensure the safety of students. It can be done by asking for references or social media account handles.
4. Once onboarded, they should have a small training to understand the nuances of the role.

Onboard the Mentees

The program team needs to decide first of all, if they want to have any selection process for the students or if they want to give a chance to every child.
Some basic pre-work or an awareness test can be used to understand the interest and awareness of the child for the program
Onboarded students should go through an orientation session to understand how can they learn with the help of the Mentors
Monthly group sessions with Mentees can be used to keep all the students motivated and on track.

Coordination by Program Coordinators

1. The program team and coordinators should map the Mentors and Mentees according to similar professional interests.
2. Program coordinators (PCs) should stay in touch with Mentors and Mentees on a weekly basis otherwise the pair may fall behind.
3. Some 15-20% of Mentors or Mentees might become irregular with the program and this may demotivate the other person in the pair. PCs should ensure that such cases are attended to on a regular basis and re-mappings can be done wherever required.

Feedback collection

Such a program can’t work effectively if regular feedback is not collected.
1. The journey of each pair may go on a different path or may have different concerns. To personalize the learning for such a large number of Mentor-Mentee pairs, their learnings, and concerns should be tracked and resolved on a regular basis.
2. Make the feedback process easy so Mentor-Mentee pairs can give feedback quickly and easily.
3. School visits should be conducted for qualitative data.