The Importance Of Faculty Mentorship
As a college president, I often sit down to talk with alumni, and the first thing they share is a story about how a relationship with a faculty member impacted their life. Faculty mentorship matters. In fact, The 2014 Gallup-Purdue Index Report found that having a faculty mentor in college doubles the odds of a person being engaged professionally, and thriving in their lives.
What faculty mentorship means: At its core, faculty mentorship involves caring about, connecting with, and catalyzing students. Mentorship done by faculty focuses on building a relationship that reaches beyond academic planning — to include helping students reflect upon and integrate their various learning experiences, and caring for and impacting students’ personal and professional growth. It is about helping students start a long process of becoming the architects of their lives.
At its most basic level, faculty mentorship is a relationship between a more-experienced mentor and a less-experienced student, where a faculty member focuses on the student’s academic, personal, and professional growth. In doing so, a faculty member shares with the student the mentor’s expertise, provides guidance and support, and serves as a role model for the student. The goal is to help students develop the skills, values, habits, networks, and experiences needed to be the architects of their own lives. A lot of the impact of mentorship comes from role modeling and/or creating reflective moments that help students learn from their curricular, co-curricular, and other experiences.
Mentorship also is fluid and, at its best, collaborative. As it may often entail guidance provided by a variety of people in a variety of roles, the group of potential mentors for any one student necessarily shifts over time. And yet, among the many mentors a student might have, there is a special and powerful role for faculty mentorship.
This point is important and stands in contrast to the traditional model of the 'one great mentor/guru' myth. Students often have a group, network, or circle of people, each of whom provide specific forms of guidance.
The conditions that foster faculty mentorship: Mentorship is organic. It emerges when the right relationships emerge at the right moment. Like all relational processes, the form and substance vary due to a range of factors. Faculty are likely to mentor differently based on their own personal attributes, and academic disciplines and departments. Faculty may mentor differently at different times of their professional careers. And of course, how we mentor will vary based on the student we are trying to connect with and catalyze.
We can, however, foster the conditions under which mentorship is more likely to emerge. As foundational conditions, mentorship is more likely to emerge when: faculty are focused on undergraduates and committed to teaching, classes are small and interactive, and students get to know a range of faculty.
To truly create an ecosystem of mentorship,, there are a other conditions that are important. For example: mentorship emerges more often when:
- Students interact with faculty around shared interests, especially intellectual and/or academic interests. Most mentorship occurs in office hours and labs, through undergraduate research opportunities and experiential components of courses, and other venues where students and faculty have a chance to share their intellectual interests.
- Interactions take place over a sustained period of time. Of course, a single conversation can be transformational for students. In some ways, we know that a single interaction with a faculty member can make the difference in a student’s experience. However, most mentorship occurs as relationships develop. Faculty get to know students and students get to know faculty. Trust develops. Moments present themselves where faculty can push students to reflect upon and evaluate their thinking. Learning unfolds.
- There is a culture of mentorship, and students are encouraged to be open to it. Students have to do their part. Mentorship is not one-directional. The success of any mentoring relationship depends on the willingness of the mentee to be mentored. One of the interesting questions for me is how do we help students learn how to be mentored, or how best to take advantage of the mentoring opportunities they have in college?
- There are ongoing professional development efforts that facilitate conversations about mentoring. We need venues to continually share data on our students, the issues they are facing, and what we know about mentoring different students differently. As part of this work, we need to find ways for faculty to interact with student development professionals on a more regular basis, to share information about our students and campus dynamics. We also need venues to share best practices.
These principles can be put into practice in a variety of ways. Three great starting places are having small and interactive classes throughout a student’s experience; supporting high impact practices like first-year seminars, undergraduate research, off-campus excursions, and capstone experiences; and supporting faculty who have interesting (even outside the box) ideas. At Denison this has ranged from supporting a professor who wanted to start a fencing program to supporting two faculty who created a monthly mentoring group for women of color.
At the same time, it’s also important to be clear on what mentorship is not: First and foremost, mentoring is not the same as friendship. Mentorship should be focused on some aspect of (or multiple aspects of) a student’s academic success, personal growth, and professional launching. Unlike friendship, the value is contingent on their success at achieving a desired end, which in this case, is student development and success. Another way to put this is that advisors and mentors are intentional about helping students learn what they need to be successful at to attain their personal and professional goals.
Mentorship also is not crisis management. Some of our students will face crises while in college. This can range from health challenges to family issues, and a range of other crises. Colleges need faculty to help identify when students are in crisis, and then to help students find the right person at the college who can help them manage the crisis. Lastly, faculty can’t be all things to a student. Ideally, students should have a network of mentors. A network is necessary, because no one person can be an expert in all areas, nor is it reasonable to expect that one person’s expertise will be relevant at all stages of a student’s experience.
Mentorship can define a transformative college experience. Mentorship can be hard to define, and even harder to measure. At the same time, my experience as a faculty member, administrator and now president, leads me to believe that it is one of the most powerful things we do and should be talked about and supported more by colleges. Of course, this will raise a lot of questions, including how we recognize and valuing this work. My own view is that this could be some of the most important work we do at the undergraduate level to enhance student learning and to demonstrate the tremendous value of an undergraduate education to helping our students develop the skills, values, habits, networks, and experiences needed to be the architects of their own lives.
