Mentoring for Academic Success: Building Relationships, Sharing Knowledge, and Fostering Growth

1. Maria Stalzer Wyant Cuzzo CETL Summer Conversation June 2014

2. • 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 Lived Legacy of the Now

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

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

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

7. • Initiation Stage • Cultivation Stage • Transformation Stage • Separation Stage Mitchell Malachowski

8. Thinking through the commitments

9. • 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

10. • 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)

11. • 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)

12. • 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)

13. • 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)

14. • 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)

16. • 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

17. • 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)

18. • “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)

19. • 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 • • • • • •