What can teachers do to help their students develop their potential? Through mentoring, we want to work on the ability to know the particular reality of each student to help, stimulate and propose new challenges that will help them grow during their time at university. With this in mind goal, the University of Navarra has published the book Tu&Co, mentoring universitario, a project that brings together more than 60 years of experience in mentoring with new working guidelines.

"The aim of the Tu&Co program is to improve mentoring at the University. Compiling the experience of many years, we have designed a methodology with phases, tools and resources to facilitate mentors' work with students," said Álvaro Lleó, professor of Personnel Management Service at Tecnun- Engineering School of the University of Navarra, one of the promoters of project and co-author of the book, published by Eunsa- Ediciones Universidad de Navarra.   

Tu&Co is presented as a program based on the development of competencies. A project that aims to help students know themselves better in order to become better people and professionals.

The book compiles the materials that make up the Tu&Co methodology: it describes 12 competencies core topic for a student's development such as communication, social skills, teamwork, conflict management skills, initiative, optimism, time management, self-knowledge, decision making, effort capacity, emotional balance and integrity. It includes an interview plan, questionnaires, a work notebook with exercises to analyze the results, guides with ideas to develop each of the competencies and finally, two cases based on real experiences. 

Experience of more than 50 teachers and 150 students

The competencies have been validated by companies that employ University students. For each of them, characteristic behaviors and examples are detailed with concrete manifestations that show what needs to be improved, questions to provoke reflection and concrete suggestions for improvement. On the other hand, the guides compile the experiences of more than 50 professors and almost 150 students. Finally, books, articles, videos, films and tools to help students are also recommended. 

The University's department IT Services has developed software tools to automate the assessment and diagnosis of competencies and a portal web site with all the program information. "I think the best of Tu&Co is yet to come. Now that the methodology is defined, we can continually improve it. As the program is used more, we will gather new ideas and best practices to keep improving mentoring with our mentees," Lleó added.