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Mentoring: gains in teaching and leadership.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

The majority of faculty who work in higher education have extensive preparation in their disciplines and little education in how to teach. In addition, faculty have limited opportunities to develop leadership skills. Since we work in an environment with a mission of educating students and with an operation system of shared governance, effective teaching and leadership are critical for the institution's success. Faculty development in the form of a formalized mentoring program can provide an avenue for the improvement of these two skills.

Introduction

A critical component of leadership development is finding opportunities for individuals to practice their leadership abilities. Mentoring provides experienced faculty with an opportunity to develop their own leadership skills while offering valuable support to younger faculty in the process. The literature on faculty development also suggests that mentoring furnishes a valuable professional development opportunity for experienced faculty--they can learn ways to improve their teaching skills from the mentees (Dutton, 2003). With these premises in mind, the Teaching and Learning Committee at a western land-grant higher education institution decided to create a new faculty mentoring program. Since the mission of the committee is to develop teaching skills, the program focused specifically on teaching. The authors of this paper have served several years on the committee and worked on the subcommittee that designed and implemented the project. The program is currently in its second year of operation in the 2006-07 school year. This paper reviews the mentoring literature, describes the program, presents the benefits and challenges experienced, and lists recommendations that others can use to develop new faculty mentoring programs on other campuses.

Context of the Program

The setting for the mentoring program described in this paper is a small land-grant university with 12,000 students in the Rocky Mountain west. Much like other universities, ours has resource constraints that prevent a fully funded teaching development center. A Teaching and Learning Committee, consisting of faculty representatives from each college and a representative from the Provost's office, exists to support the needs of faculty seeking to improve their teaching. In the past, the majority of the budget has been devoted to teaching awards, teaching innovation grants, and lunch events, most of which are short-term and benefit more experienced faculty. The Teaching and Learning Committee sought a way to leverage limited resources, provide support for new faculty, and offer an additional opportunity for experienced faculty. With this intention in mind, members of the committee decided that a mentoring program would require few resources with potentially large benefits. The New Faculty Mentoring Program pairs excellent senior faculty with new faculty with the goal of providing teaching support for the new professor and professional development in the area of leadership and teaching for experienced faculty.

Literature Review

Mentoring pairs a more experienced individual with a less experienced individual with the express purpose of the mentor...