Peer-reviewed article
THE MEANING OF MENTORING IN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
Vadim M. Rosin ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This article explores the concept of mentoring in early childhood education, distinguishing it from related roles like teaching and tutoring. The author argues that mentoring involves personalizing education to support individual student development, independence, and self-directed learning. The article describes how children progress through early childhood by learning to enter the adult world through understanding, creating their own reality, and imitating adults, while acquiring practical skills like reading, counting, and drawing. The mentor's role is to create an environment that fosters both intellectual development and the formation of a healthy, independent person.
Key points
- Mentoring in early childhood involves reorienting education toward individual student needs, independence, and self-education rather than standardized approaches
- Early childhood development consists of three fundamental processes: understanding the world, creating one's own reality, and imitating adult life
- Preschool education should teach both practical techniques (reading, counting, drawing) and reasoning skills as behavior becomes increasingly complex
- Parents often reduce support as children move toward independence, which requires children to develop their own internal schemas and self-perceptions
- The mentor must create an environment that supports both intelligence formation and development of the whole person oriented toward harmonious individual destiny
Limitations
This is a conceptual article that does not evaluate specific mentoring interventions or provide empirical evidence of outcomes. It offers no data on which countries' educational contexts are discussed, nor does it compare different mentoring approaches or measure their effectiveness with children.
Abstract
The article clarifies the meaning of this concept, which in literature intersects with such concepts as a teacher, an educator, a mentor, a tutor, a leader, etc. The author sees in mentoring not a fashion, but an important trend, consisting in the reorientation of education to the individuality of the student, his/her independence and self-education, individual educational programs, joint activities with a teacher. To these characteristics, he adds an approach that involves solving a dual educational task – creating conditions (environment) for the formation of intelligence and the formation of a new image of a person (both sides of this task are specified based on the analysis of educational cases). The stages of the formation, development and completion of childhood and the associated features of mentoring are outlined. The early development of a child consists in the process of overcoming the inability to enter the world of adults and includes three fundamental moments – understanding, creating one's own world (reality), and the imitation of the adult life. An important area of preschool education is teaching techniques: reading, counting, drawing, modeling, correct reasoning, etc. Behavior is constantly becoming more complex, they learn many new ways of activity. It is at this stage that parents often begin to support the child less. He/she gradually moves to the independent behavior, the condition of which is the construction of “private” schemes, attributing certain characteristics to themselves, designing the world for themselves and seeing themselves in it. It is indicated that the mentor must ensure the creation of an environment for the formation of intelligence and for the development of a person. The image of such a person should be oriented towards a normal individual destiny, which implies life in harmony with oneself and participation in the salvation of life on earth.