These skills will allow faculty to be more effective mentors, a skill that is important in both academic and non-academic workplaces. Their improved mentoring skills will enhance their students’ success by facilitating more rapid progress to the degree, encouraging increased scholarly productivity, and fostering the development of professional skills that equip students for a competitive job market. As their students’ success typically reflects faculty success as well, both students and faculty will develop skills that are relevant to the expectations of today’s job market.
Additionally, as effective teaching and mentorship are closely intertwined with tenure and promotion, the skills learned throughout these modules should be evidence of additional training in areas valued by the colleges and greater university in promotion and tenure decisions.
Participants will attend 6 sessions,and the total facilitated training time will be 10 hours. A “Mentoring Philosophy and Plan,” described in the assessment section, will be completed by each participant in addition to the workshops. This mentorship philosophy and plan will require an additional 10 hours of work.
Total time required: 20 hours
The program will consist of training workshops that will be led by USM faculty “trainers.” Initially, the trainers will be faculty who completed the CIMER workshop, and later will include faculty who complete this microcredential. All sessions will use components of a curriculum developed by CIMER from a published workbook written by experts in mentor training (Pfund, Branchaw, and Handelsman, 2014). There will be three sessions offered each term. The first two sessions in the fall and the spring will be 1.5-hour workshops facilitated by two CIMER trained faculty. The final program for each term will be a 2-hour Lunch and Learn Workshop featuring round table discussions of case studies relevant to topics covered during previous sessions. The total facilitated training time will be 10 hours. The curriculum will be tentatively scheduled as follows:
Workshop:
- September: Maintaining Effective Communication and Aligning Expectations
- October: Promoting Professional Development
- November: Lunch and Learn Workshop
- January: Reflecting on Diversity and Addressing Inclusion
- February: Fostering Well-being & Cultivating Ethical Behavior
- March: Lunch and Learn Workshop
Finally, a “Mentoring Philosophy and Plan,” described in the assessment section, will be completed by each participant in addition to the workshops. Participants will spend an additional 10 hours completing the “Mentoring Philosophy & Plan.”
Reference:
Pfund, C., Branchaw, J., and Handelsman, J. Entering Mentoring. 1st edition, W.H. Freeman & Company. 2014.
Skillsets acquired
Participants will:
- Increase their knowledge and skills of evidence-based research mentoring competencies.
- Learn characteristics of effective communication to improve communication with diverse mentees.
- Design, align, and clearly communicate expectations for the mentoring relationship.
- Define and articulate what self-efficacy is, know its four sources, and practice strategies for building mentees’ self-efficacy in scholarship.
- Increase understanding of and concrete strategies to address equity and inclusion and their influence on mentor-mentee interactions.
Return to: