Mentor Role

This assignment will critically discuss the role of a mentor when assessing student accurately. Supporting, assessing, teaching, accountability and the barriers which hinder the accurate assessment will be discussed. A mentor is someone who can assess, teach, support and facilitate the learning needs of a student in a clinical placement (NMC 2008). There are so many roles of a mentor assessing, adviser, role model, problem solver, teacher, support, organiser and planner. Mentors have the responsibility of assessing students accurately by establishing effective working relationships, facilitating learning environment, accountable and assessment (NMC 2008). A mentor is responsible for helping students to apply theory into practice. Assessment

According to Duffy (2004) it is important for the mentor to facilitate learning needs and assessment by giving the student the opportunity to reflect on their learning needs and assess themselves. It is also arguable that it is important for a student to identify their own learning needs and self-assessment but the mentor needs to adhere to assessment process in order to provide fair and accurate assessment (Walsh 2014). The most important role of a mentor is to assess the progress of a student accurately and identify the learning needs and problems which the student is encountering on a placement at an early stage. (Philips et al 2000). To assess accurately and holistically a mentor should be able to assess the student’s competency through measurable assessment tools and to do assessment process accurately (Embo et al 2015). When a mentor is assessing the student accurately he or she is able to identify whether the student may fail at an early stage. A mentor is able to follow the right pathway with the student and university which involves link lecture and personal tutor (Maloney et al 1997). Gope (2015) suggested that assessment can also be opportunity to identify learning needs and considering the action of achieving

Royal College of nursing (2009) states that effective assessment can be done by direct observation, testimony from peers or service uses. The feedback from colleagues and patients makes it easier for mentor to make a decision and reassurance (Hand 2006). According to NMC (2008) mentors must always be fair and open to student’s learning development in the clinical placement. Accurately assessment helps the student to identify they learning needs and how to improve the performance (Walsh 2014). Hunt (2014) study showed that mentors need to be confident, competent and have knowledge to understand something instinctively without the need for conscious reasoning from factual student’s concerns in order to provide coherent assessment evidence. Assessment can be done in two forms which are formative and summative. Formative assessment is a stage where a mentor gives advice to the student’s performance and identify the learning needs (Kinnell and Hughes 2010). During the formative assessment with my student I was able to discuss the areas of needs, and how to improve them and also his strengths. Formative assessment helped my student to acknowledge his achievements and his strength and weakness. Summative is a stage which is done at the end term to see the competency against the learning needs of the programme (Price