Mentoring Handbook/Questionnaire

This is a collection of questions that could be asked on a questionnaire for parents and protégés. (first sketch)

Protégés should be encouraged to mention afterthoughts at any time, also several weeks or months after filling out the questionnaire. Parents and protégés could be allowed to read the questionnaire first and to agree on what questions should be answered verbally and what questions they would like to leave out entirely. Parents could also be allowed to keep one or two prints of the questionnaire and to hand in a more well considered version. Spontaneous answers to previously unknown questions may be suitable to find out how much consideration somebody had given to a topic before being asked.

Related topic: Code of conduct of the mentoring organization. (e.g. privacy)

Silly questions

• Do you have a rule to help each other in your family? (good topic, insufficient question)
• Are you a democratic family? (good topic, insufficient question)
• How often do family members disagree and fail to make up? (possibly too personal, undiplomatic, numbers are secondary)

Conduct

• What official agreements or rules do you have in your family?

• Who decides what and when in your family? Do you hold a family council on occasion?
• Is that satisfactory?

• Do you have a constructive culture of criticism and disagreement (or are your disagreements uncultivated)? (false dilemma: The missing middle ground is the large area of badly considered behavior that somehow leads to tolerable results. Offering a false dilemma allows the readers to object; the answer to the next question should help to distinguish a culture of criticism from badly considered behavior)
• Please describe your culture of criticism abstractly. (e.g. do you consider making up mandatory, of no importance or anything in between)

• If you were a family of superheros, what would be your respective super powers? This question is slightly funny so it isn't taken too seriously.

(e.g. can-break-own-rules, can-break-rule-X, can-fail-to-help, can-follow-a-whim, can-let-others-do-the-work, can-leave-a-mess, can-fail-to-educate)

General education inside the family

(for the protégé)

• What life skills do you need to learn before living on your own?
• Do your parents educate you? How often?(Please specify an estimate number and a scale: daily, weekly, monthly, in the last year, in the last ten years, ever)
• Would you wish your parents to educate more often?
• Would your parents be qualified as educators or would you wish them to be more qualified (e.g. to read up on a topic first)?
• Are there any other persons (inside or outside your extended family) you would wish to educate you more often?

General education outside the family

(for the protégé)

• What topics interest you most?
• What are the school subjects you like best?
• Are there school subjects you would like best, irrespective of the way they are taught in school? (This could be an indicator for a need for extracurricular learning in relation to a school subject)
• What activities outside school are related to these topics?
• What related activities do you know you might like to try?
• What books have you read lately? (parents and protégé)

Hobbies

• What are your hobbies? (parents and protégé)

• What hobbies do you share inside the family? (please specify all groups of family members that share hobbies and their hobbies)

• What hobbies do you share with friends? (please specify groups or social circles and the related hobbies)

Socializing, Social skills

• Do you have a boy friend/girl friend? (At what age does that question make sense?)
• Number of best friends? (Does that question make sense? At what age? A protégé could be asked to explain the difference between best friends, personal friends and good acquaintances.)
• Number of personal friends? (rough estimate, parents and protégé)
• Number of good acquaintances? (rough estimate, parents and protégé)

• Have you trained any soft skills explicitly? (parents and protégé)
• What social skills would you ascribe to yourself? (parents and protégé)
• What soft skills would you like to improve? (parents and protégé)
• What social skills would you like to see developed? (parents about protégé)