Psychological Well-Being: Using Self-determination Theory to Examine the Reciprocal Benefits of Mentoring and Teaching Others

This study explores the reciprocal benefits that high-school peer mentors experience while participating in a cross-age peer mentoring program. Mentors were trained to support the basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence, belonging) of their mentees while teaching them to play music. A pre-post mentoring self-report questionnaire was used to assess the amount of reciprocal basic psychological need satisfaction that mentors experienced. Findings indicated that mentors experienced reciprocal satisfaction for all three basic psychological needs from Time-1 (4-weeks of mentoring) to Time-2 (8-weeks of mentoring). The need for competence was the only need that demonstrated a statistically significant increase from Time-1 to Time-2. Implications for both theory and practice in classrooms is discussed.