Advocate Online

Thriving in Academe
Best Practices

Programmatic Mentoring in Action

Faculty and Institutional Vitality are Linked
While mentoring benefits both junior and senior faculty, an often-overlooked beneficiary is the academic organization itself. When face-to-face mentoring is part of faculty development that also involves other campus constituencies, overall organizational functioning improves. In one program, for instance, professional and support service staff from various units in the college are invited to an “information fair” where the bureaucracy gets a human face and new instructors get a better understanding of “how things work around here.” Such activities (and other events in which top administrators participate) establish lines of communication and feedback mechanisms between departments, allowing systems to become self-correcting and forging stronger links among faculty, administration, and professional staff. By facilitating faculty achievement and self-actualization, mentoring can humanize and energize the institution, thus contributing to the development of a dynamic organization.

System Support is Essential
A comparison of two mentoring programs for novice teachers (Feiman-Nemser and Parker, 1992) found that the more successful one chose mentors on the basis of demonstrated qualities such as leadership, love of learning, and team spirit. Mentors in this program were also released from normal teaching responsibilities, freeing them to devote time to mentoring as they continued to receive mentor training throughout the academic year. In contrast, the less successful program selected mentors bureaucratically, using narrow performance criteria. After an introductory workshop, mentoring duties were simply added to regular teaching loads, thereby reducing the mentor role to little more than a glorified orientation function.

next "Thriving" article