Given that mentoring relationships are learner-centered, mentees should have significant agency in developing their mentoring constellations. In this section, we explore strategies and resources mentees can use to identify and develop meaningful and mentoring relationships.  

Mentoring relationships “promote academic, social, personal, identity, cultural, and/or career-focused learning and development in intentional, sustained, and integrative ways,” but no single relationship needs to support all of those developmental functions. Mentees can identify and develop multiple meaningful and mentoring relationships. Mentees don’t have to find one perfect mentor—if such a person even exists!  

The relationship-rich mentoring map can be a tool for exploring who’s supporting mentees’ learning and development. Mentees can map who is providing identity support, who is providing academic support, who is providing career support, and so forth. They also can map the characteristics of those relationships to self-assess who is part of a meaningful relationship, which meaningful relationships might be moving towards mentoring relationships, and who already is part of a reciprocal and mutually beneficial mentoring relationship.  

Once mentees map who’s part of their mentoring constellation, they also can identify gaps. What types of support are they seeking, and who might be able to provide that developmental support? In addition, mentees might prioritize different relationship functions at different times during their college journey (and beyond). They might seek more social or identity support early during their college career as they seek a sense of belonging at the institution and later pursue relationships that provide more career-focused support as they prepare for graduation. Moreover, relationships are not static, and mentoring relationships might shift (back) to meaningful relationships if they later become less reciprocal. 

Mentoring relationships also “are individualized, attending to mentees’ developing strengths and shifting needs, mentors’ expertise, and all members’ identities.” Therefore, mentees benefit from strategies for self-assessing and voicing their evolving needs. 

Opportunities for guided reflection—like those offered by the FIRE (Facilitating Integration and Reflection of Engaged Learning) Toolkit—can help mentees consider their values and goals, seek connections among experiences, and identify their relational needs for their personal development. Mentees also can track their self-reflections over time to explore how their functional support needs evolve. 

Recurring check-in tools, like IowaGROW, offer an additional model for voicing evolving needs in conversation with members of a mentee’s constellation. Iowa GROW and its spin-offs prioritize career development in on-campus employment, but mentees can use the questions/conversations to share their mentoring map with supervisors and to ask for input about who else might support the mentee’s development. 

The Salient Practices were developed specifically for mentoring relationships in undergraduate research, but many of the practices can support other mentoring relationships. For example, mentees might ask the people in their mentoring constellations for models and guidance on: 

• Balancing meeting rigorous expectations with seeking emotional support, 
• Building community—within and beyond the mentee’s constellation, and 
• Increasing their ownership of tasks and projects over time.  

All of these strategies—and others we’ll discuss in future posts—are recursive and collectively reinforcing. When a student has an active role in self-assessing their needs, they’re better prepared to voice their evolving needs, and when they contribute to building community within their mentoring constellation, they may feel more comfortable asking for personal support.  

Authors

Jessie L. Moore is Director of the Center for Engaged Learning and Professor of English: Professional Writing & Rhetoric at Elon University.

Learn more about the authors and the Mentoring Matters project.

How to Cite this Post

Moore, Jessie L. 2025. “Strategies and Resources for Mentees Developing Mentoring Constellations.” In Mentoring Matters: Supporting Students’ Development of Mentoring Constellations in Higher Education. Elon University Center for Engaged Learning. https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/strategies-and-resources-for-mentees-developing-mentoring-constellations.