Mentoring

Faculty Served: New appointed faculty 
Approach: Scaffolded experiences: welcomes, stand alone workshops, links to existing resources; Canvas course; 3 years of programming.

View our New Faculty web page for more information.

Faculty Served: Adjunct/Part-time Faculty
Approach: Celebration of professional development for part-time faculty, including orientation, OTL programs, etc.

View the ATEP program website for more information.

Faculty Served: All faculty 
Appraoch: Faculty writing support groups, including Writing Accountability Groups and Writing in Place drop-in sessions.

View our Faculty Writing Support web page for more information. 

Faculty Served: Chairs and Directors 
Approach: Peer-to-peer mentoring and training for department chairs and program directors.

View the Chairs and Directors Handbook for more information. 

Faculty Served: Faculty & Staff 
Approach: The newly established 4D Mentorship Collaborative is a community of university faculty and staff dedicated to fostering and advancing a rich and inclusive culture of mentorship at DU.

Fill out this 4D registration form to get connected or reach out to 4D Associate Director of Mentoring, Sam Anderson-Lehman. 

Faculty Served: Two programs: 1) New Appointed Faculty, 2) All Appointed Faculty
Approach: 1) New Faculty Orientation: University resources, Promotion Review Process, Policies and Processes (e.g., IT, Annual Merit Review) and introduction to Daniels graduate and undergraduate programs.  

2) Yearly separate Zoom sessions with Associate Dean and representatives from Daniels Tenure Track and Teaching and Professional Promotion/Review Committees to discuss the review process

For more information, contact Kellie Keeling, Chair and Associate Professor for the Daniels College of Business Department of Business Information and Analytics

Faculty Served: All appointed faculty
Approach: Utilizes a mentoring map to build a network of mentors that can help with specific topics. Pilot began with pre-tenure track faculty and will expand.

For more information, contact Michael Talamantes, Clinical Professor of Social Work. 

Faculty Served: New faculty (TT/TPF lines)
Approach: Mentoring program for new MCE faculty. Dyad model with a senior faculty and new faculty, built around mentee’s mentoring plan. Two meetings per quarter. In addition to dyads, for new faculty cohorts in their first year, there are monthly onboarding meetings covering many topics (e.g. instructional design, grants, promotion/tenure, wellness).

For more information, contact the Morgridge College of Education. 

Faculty Served: All faculty
Approach: Not mentoring, per se, but a group that collaborates on teaching practices.

For more information, contact Nic Ormes, NSM Associate Dean. 

Faculty Served: Assistant Professors
Approach: 1) New assistant/visiting assistant professors are formally paired with a professor that has attained promotion. 2) Monthly group mentoring meetings.  3) Onboarding committee for new assistant professors.

For more information, contact Bridget Farrell, Associate Professor and Coordinator of Library Instruction and Reference Services University Libraries. 

Faculty Served: Tenure line/tenured women with biomolecular focus in research. All levels.
Approach: A peer mentoring group focused on research. Collaborative with CU Anschutz. Meets monthly and includes 7-9 faculty.

For more information, contact Michelle Knowles, Professor of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. 

Faculty Served: Women faculty in biology, all levels, tenure and teaching lines
Approach: A peer group focused on mentoring women in Biology. Meets ~quarterly.

For more information, contact Anna Sher, Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. 

Faculty Served: All Faculty
Approach: Monthly meetings in person/on zoom. Topics addressed are quite organic – usually center on university/college level issues.

For more information, view DU’s Women’s Coalition website. 

Mentoring plans help departments or units to articulate how faculty will receive the mentoring and support they will need to be successful in their new or continuing roles. This mentoring plan from the University of Massachusetts Amherst helps mentoring teams to tailor plans to each new hire.

It helps if the mentee has clear goals for what they want or need in a mentor. Check out The University of Washington’s Mentoring Toolkit  if you are a mentee and need to identify goals for a mentoring relationship. Afterwards, a conversation with a chair, dean, or colleague could help identify new mentors that would fit at the university. For example, this could include identifying a mentor in the same line (e.g. teaching, tenure, etc) or with a certain skill (e.g. successful at receiving funding from the NSF) or an affinity group.

Virtual mentoring or E-Mentoring build relationships through online media. The mentoring may take place entirely through electronic communication or could be developed in person and then move to an online format. Some online services in this area exist already, like MentorNet (http://mentornet.net), which is a free resource for women in Engineering and Science that matches students, post-docs, and early-career researchers across universities and within industry. The National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN; https://nrmnet.net/) provides similar opportunities to make connections with a mentor based on your desired search criteria and to explore long-term mentoring connections with guided prompts that help facilitate mentorship relationships. NRMN specifically serves the biomedical, behavioral, clinical, and social sciences. 

1.  Acknowledge and reward mentorship within the typical research, service, teaching review categories during merit reviews.
2. Provide funding to support mentoring (e.g. for mentor/mentee to have lunch/coffee).
3. Recognize mentors in promotion/reappointment to show that mentorship is valued. For example, other universities offer mentoring awards.
4. At DU, CAHSS provides faculty mentors with a stipend.
5. Remember to not  over-burden certain identity groups as mentors.

1. The National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity’s mentoring map can help faculty identify mentorship needs. 
2. The GSSW mentoring map for mentees also highlights different areas where mentors may be needed.
3. The Teaching and Professional Faculty Lifecycle identifies mentoring focal points across a faculty’s career from onboarding through promotion and retirement.
4. Mentoring agreements/plans are common in traditional mentor-mentee relationships. They define meeting frequency, goal-setting, and the expectations of each person. Links to several examples are available in the Selected Programs at Other Institutions section above.

Psychology has a skill matching program for graduate students that might be a good model for faculty as well. Graduate students volunteer their expertise and all new students receive a list of topics they might need mentorship or other help around with contact information for potential topical mentors. Here’s a table from the University of Iowa where expertise/needs can be identified for some common faculty topics.

Mentoring improves job satisfaction and can build valued relationships. It can help you understand what your colleagues need and help them be successful and stay at DU. This could mean that you have one less search committee in the future. It also is a service activity that can be added to Workload Equity dashboards, if they exist in your unit, and in annual evaluations.

 Evidence shows that most people benefit from having mentors, from students to early career faculty to mid-career and beyond. For example, a mentor could be useful when transitioning research, teaching a new course, earning promotion, or taking on leadership roles at DU. The National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity’s mentoring map can help faculty identify mentorship needs. 

Pairing can happen by identifying what you are specifically in need of. See the GSSW program for useful structures. After identifying needs, a chair, director or colleague could help identify good mentors. The Writing Program uses small group mentor cohorts, which takes some pressure off dyad pairings and adds more voices to the mix.

There are numerous resources available to help train mentors in core mentoring skills. This document from North Carolina State University provides some fantastic resources to start mentor training in your unit. There is also training available online, for instance, through NCFDD and CIMER, and mentoring training is being developed in various units at DU (for instance, through the MERISTEM ADVANCE grant programming, through the VPFA’s Mentoring community of practice, and in the Writing Program). 

Consider getting coffee with a new colleague to check-in or participating in any micro-mentoring or online mentoring opportunities in your college or unit.