Mentoring and URSCAMaria Stalzer Wyant CuzzoCETL Summer Conversation June 2014

• The Story Then: Homer, The Odyssey, Ullysses, Mentor (Athena), Telemachus

• The Story Now: Elise Pearson Brown• Assumptions: exposing our students to

our own interests/enthusiasms, introducing them to larger community of scholars and helping them with emotional questions of this way of life

• Discussion (i): what kind of mentoring have you experienced in your academic career? Who was your best mentor and what did they do? Share with each other (5 minutes with one partner)

• Discussion (ii): what is your philosophy of mentoring undergraduate students? (5 minutes with a new partner)

The Origins in the WestThe Lived Legacy of the Now

How to Mentor Graduate Students: A Guide for Faculty, Rackham Graduate School, p. 13

“I am able to approach [my mentor] and express my concerns comfortably, they expect hard work from me and I expect patience and consideration from them.”

How to Mentor Graduate Students: A Guide for Faculty, Rackham Graduate School, p. 13

“I value that my mentor is very honest and that I always end a meeting with my mentor feeling as though I can tackle my problems.”

Content knowledge of discipline, logistical management and sense of purpose and strategy

What does mentoring involve?

What are the stages of mentoring?

• Initiation Stage• Cultivation Stage• Transformation Stage• Separation Stage

StagesMitchell Malachowski

Thinking through the commitments

What does the effective mentor do?

• What content does mentee need to learn?• What methods are

critical in the field?• How does one produce

scholarship in your discipline or original, creative work?• “easy one”---we all just

have to know our discipline and know how to teach

Teaching the Code of the Discipline

• Mentoring involves RELATIONSHIP• Opening yourself to form a bond (vulnerability, risk, connection)• Spending quality time, attention, energy in the mentee and their success• Sharing your own achievements and failures so someone else can learn from them• Committing yourself to a long-term relationship with your mentee• Discussion: how do you build positive RELATIONSHIP with your mentees? What are the successes and challenges you’ve faced in doing this? (3 minutes)

Investing in the RELATIONSHIP

• Modeling involves:• Thinking through what it means to be a successful academic who practices their art and science with integrity----explaining that to another• Knowing your professional conduct standards and expectations---teaching that another• Exploring the ethical dilemmas of your field---sharing those with another• Showing how you do your own work---opening that process to another’s view• DISCUSSION: share one example of a professional conduct expectation in your discipline that you need to share with your mentee (3 minutes)

Modeling Professional Conduct, Behavior and Responsibility

• Explaining undergraduate success, graduate school potentials and career pathways• Rendering visible the written

and unwritten rules of the game in your discipline• Helping mentees formulate the

right questions • Clarifying expectations• Discussion: what might be an

example of an “unwritten rule” in your discipline that you could share with mentees? (3 minutes)

Demystifying the Future

• Soft toward the mentee but hard on the evaluation for work product (partial to student; impartial to quality of work)

• Setting clear expectations for projects and following through with mentee on completion

• Helping mentees manage their time and project focus

• Devising plans and meeting goals• Encouraging self-direction and

personal responsibility• Discussion: how do you practice

accountability with mentees? (3 minutes)

Holding Mentees Accountable

• Introducing them to others in the discipline or field• Help them connect with

future jobs or institutions• Bringing the community

into the effort of mentoring• Discussion: share 1-2

networking connections you can facilitate with your mentees in your next project? (3 minutes)

Connecting Mentees with the Network

What are some guidelines for quality mentoring?

Best Practices of Mentoring• Get to know your mentee as a person: what are their

interests, what is their personal story, what is their background? Share your story with them

• Be transparent about expectations up front and in beginning

• Define boundaries (access, personal/professional, respectful behavior)

• Give TIME to the mentee---make time, don’t allow interruptions, focus your energy

• Be involved every step in the student’s project: setting deadlines, reviewing drafts, providing assessment of progress, helping publishing/presenting

Best Practices of Mentoring (II)• Use concrete language in critique---generalities

may not work; be constructive (not destructive) and temper criticism with praise

• Keep track of mentee progress and CELEBRATE openly

• Support the value of mistakes; share your own• Be tuned to emotional and physical distress of

mentee• Tell the mentee what you are learning from them

as well as what they need to learn• Discussion: pick two best practices that you want

to focus on and explain to your table how you will implement this in your next URSCA project (5 minutes)

Who are WE?• “Mentors are advisers, people with career

experience willing to share their knowledge; supporters, people who give emotional and moral encouragement; tutors, people who give specific feedback to one’s performance; masters, in the sense of employers to whom one is apprenticed; sponsors, sources of information about and aid in obtaining opportunities; models, of identity of the kind of person one should be to be an academic.” Morris Zelditch (1995)

Citations• Mitchell Malachowski, The Mentoring Role in Undergraduate Research

Projects, Council on Undergraduate Research Quarterly, December 1996• Herb Childress, Gloria Cox, Susan Eve, Amy Orr and Julio Rivera, Mentoring

as a socializing activity—supporting undergraduate research in the social sciences, 2009

• Handelman, Pfund, Lauffer and Pribbenow, Entering Mentoring: A Seminar to Train a New Generation of Scientists, Wisconsin Program for Scientific Teaching, 2005

• How to Mentor Graduate Students: A Guide for Faculty, University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School, 2013

• University of Miami, The Mentoring Guide, Office of Undergraduate Research, www.miami,edu/ugr

• Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research webpage, Undergraduate Research Mentoring Exercises, http://cra-w.org/ArticleDetails/tabid/77/ArticleID/109/Resources-for-Mentors-of-Undergraduate-Research.aspx

• For multi-purpose articles, see http://cra-w.org/ArticleDetails/tabid/77/ArticleID/109/Resources-for-Mentors-of-Undergraduate-Research.aspx