Posted by eporter on December 16, 2025
Helping Mentors Reignite Student Engagement in School After the Holiday Break
Around this time of year, many students are starting to experience burnout in school. Students often feel exhausted after completing final projects and exams at the end of the fall semester or start to lose motivation for schoolwork after several months of school without any major breaks. During the holidays, many students may be experiencing family and social obligations, financial stress, and loneliness that can make it hard for them to feel motivated to return to school after holiday break. For many students, returning to school after the holidays means entering a new semester with brand new classes and also, probably new classmates, starting new learning content, or beginning prep for major end-of-year tests or mandated exams. All these factors can make it difficult for students to feel or want to be engaged when they return to school.
Mentoring relationships can play an important role in boosting students’ academic engagement. When mentors are prepared with high-quality, pre-match training, they may be able to enhance students’ academic success by helping their mentees believe that they can grow and learn, feel connected to their school, and transform aspirations into achievable goals and plans. Mentoring Central created a web-based, interactive training program, Promoting Enhanced Resilience & Learning (PERL), to prepare mentors to begin a relationship with their mentee and equip them with strategies to help their mentee grow and learn in school.
PERL teaches mentors strategies to be intentional in their interactions with their mentee to boost their mentee’s growth mindset, goal-setting, and school engagement. The skills that mentors learn from the training to boost their mentees’ academic engagement may be particularly useful at this time of year, when many students are experiencing burnout.
PERL teaches mentors what school engagement is, signs that their mentee may not be engaged in school, and some reasons why mentees may or may not feel engaged at school. Mentors learn the three dimensions of student engagement in school, including cognitive, behavioral, and emotional. They also learn what it means for a student to feel a sense of belonging in school and to value their academics. Then, mentors explore their abilities as a mentor to promote their mentees’ school engagement and learn specific strategies to do so.
Providing mentors with training that teaches them how they can help build their mentees’ resiliency and stay engaged in school is a key way that your program can help combat school burnout for mentees involved in your program. If you are interested in learning more about the PERL training program, visit https://mentoringcentral.net/mentoring-training/perl/. To purchase PERL for your mentors, click here.