Support, Challenge, Vision
I didn’t design our fifteen-month curriculum around a theory. I designed it around what I watched work, and only later found the theoretical language for it.
Daloz (1999) describes effective mentoring as three interlocking functions: support, acknowledging someone’s reality without judgment; challenge, introducing productive disequilibrium and raising expectations; and vision, holding an image of what’s possible when someone can’t yet hold it themselves. Daloz argued none of the three work alone. Support without challenge produces comfortable stagnation. Challenge without support produces collapse. Vision without either is just motivation with nowhere to land.
When I finally read Daloz, years into running this program, I recognized our own structure immediately. Intake and orientation are support. The financial curriculum itself, budgeting, credit, saving, decision-making under real complexity, is challenge. And the fifteen-month duration, the community of graduates who’ve already done it, my own story of getting here, that’s vision.
I didn’t build it that way because I’d read Daloz. I built it that way because anything less didn’t work. The theory came afterward, as confirmation, not as a blueprint.
More on this in this week’s episode.
Has your own practice ever run ahead of the theory that eventually explained it?
Author: Sandra Roussel
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