How do we as adults help young people form identities? It seems that the more we do to promote identity development, the less free they will be to form identities for themselves. In the CLP, our approach is to think of promoting positive identity development in probabilistic terms as creating conditions for positive identity development. Let me describe how we try to create these conditions. 

In our adaptation of the CLP, a college student meets with a small group of high school students each week for two school semesters. Meetings last about an hour, maybe less. During these meetings, it is the college student’s task to facilitate a mentoring relationship characterized by two important conditions for positive identity development at the level of interpersonal interaction: (1) interpersonal support and (2) participatory co-learning. These conditions are also the immediate goals of CLP mentors, which I will refer to as Relationship Goals. These are outlined in Table 1.

The first Relationship Goal is to provide interpersonal support by through empathy, praise, and attention (Karcher et al., 2008). My idea is that if CLP mentors consistently provide empathy, praise, and attention to their mentees, then the mentees will gain a sense that they matter to their mentors. Mattering is a person’s perception of her or his importance to specific other people and social institutions (Marshall, 2010). Mattering is a relational dimension of identity development that emerges out of interpersonal interactions that provide eye-to-eye validation, the sense of being seen by another person (Josselson, 1992; Marshall, 2001). Mattering is thus a form of reflected appraisal. In other words, the mentor is like a social mirror that reflects back to the mentee what she or he means to the mentor and, perhaps, to the adult world in general.

The second Relationship Goal is to facilitate participatory co-learning. Participatory co-learning means learning from each other. CLP mentors aim to replace didactic teacher -> student interactions (and avoid unidirectional client -> therapist interactions) with a dialogue in which  mentees and mentors share teaching and learning roles (mentor <--> mentee interactions). In other words, participatory co-learning is intended to be mutually impactful (unlike teaching or counseling). I want to describe several features of participatory co-learning that I think are important: collaborative talk, reflective dialogue, and story sharing.

Collaborative talk is talking with, not talking to (Anderson, 2007). Talking with mentees instead of talking to them creates conditions in which the mentees and mentor can become conversational partners who learn from each other. The starting point for talking with is curiosity. Mentors must be curious about the lives of the mentees and willing to learn about them however they choose to present themselves.

Because talking with is not as familiar to most adolescents as being talked to, they will have to learn how to participate in collaborative talk. Consequently, it is often helpful to provide a conversational structure, or scaffold (Vygotsky, 1978), to help mentees gain skill in dialogue and to facilitate sharing about day-to-day experiences. The general session structure outlined in Table 2 shows the conversational structure that we use.

When mentors invite mentees to talk about their experiences, they invite them into a reflective dialogue about their lives. Reflective dialogue is talking about subjective experience such as thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and so on. Reflective dialogue is not just aimless talking. It is the process of co-constructing the meaning of ongoing experiences. Reflective dialogue is important because the meaning of an experience a mentee has had is not automatically built into the event itself. The mentee constructs what an experience means to him or herself by thinking and talking about it. In other words, the mentee narrates his or her experiences in reflective dialogue with others.

The narrations mentees tell in everyday conversations are called small stories (Bamberg, 2011). They include what mentees tell the mentor and each other about what is happening, has recently happened, or might happen in their daily lives. These small stories are a form of self-presentation. When mentees tell their small stories, they attune them to the here-and-now conversational flow. In doing so, they practice their identities. Over time, this daily practice of identity in varying social situations builds up a sense of consistency and sameness. In other words, mentees co-construct their identities with conversation partners in the ordinary situations of everyday life, and mentoring provides a conversational context in which they can co-construct their identities with a new, more advanced conversation partner: the CLP mentor. 

A mentor's stories about her or his own experiences can be valuable resources for mentees because they add to their narrative ecology. A mentee’s narrative ecology is made up of the stories available to the mentee as she or she grows up, including personal stories, those of important others, and cultural stories (McLean, 2016). Mentees can draw on these stories to co-construct their own.

In summary, the CLP mentor's primary task is to create conditions for positive identity development, which include interpersonal support and participatory co-learning. It may help to simplify even further. CLP mentors are (1) supportive and (2) collaborative.