Fostering Sustainability: A Case Study of a Pilot Mentoring Program at a Private University

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to provide documentation of a one year Pilot Mentoring Program (PMP) that was implemented within a department at a school of education within a private university. PMP was tied to the culture and specific needs of the department. It included seven newly hired faculty members and their mentor who were from various programs within the department. Even though PMP evolved over the course of an academic year, and was labeled a formal mentoring program, it was restricted to a trial basis. As PMP evolved, an exploratory qualitative action-research study was conducted.

Mentoring Matters: An Exploratory Survey of Educational Leadership Doctoral Students’ Perspectives

“…Some universities provide an elaborate matching program between mentors and mentees as a structured design to the relationship (Campbell, 2007). Researchers have posited that formal, structured, and intentional mentoring programs are best designed to meet the goals of retention, academic performance, and placement in graduate school and that the institutional context influences how the faculty-graduate student mentorship relationship is defined (Creighton et al, 2010;Davis, 2008;Lunsford, 2012;Marcellino, 2011;Schlosser & Foley, 2008).…”

Mixed-Methods Assessment of a Mentoring Program

“…The current literature review confirms there are few published assessments of mentoring programs, but uncovers a different balance of mixed method and solely quantitative or qualitative method studies. Mixed method studies (Bean et al, 2014;Fox, 2012;Marcellino, 2011;Thomas et al, 2015) and qualitative studies (Bell & Treleaven, 2011;Carney et al, 2016;Hubball et al, 2010) compose a minority of the mentoring assessments. Quantitative studies, employing one or more methods, are more prevalent (Bertram et al, 2015;Browning et al, 2014;Cofrancesco et al, 2018;Huenneke et al, 2017;Mayer et al, 2014;Minnick et al, 2018;Morrison et al, 2014;Sheridan et al, 2015;Slimmer, 2012;Varkey et al, 2012;Weaver, 2013).…”

“…About half of the quantitative studies use a survey, alone or in addition to other quantitative tools. Researchers who report on a single administration of a survey, usually do so after the pilot year(s) of a mentoring program (Marcellino, 2011;Sheridan et al, 2015;Slimmer, 2012;Thomas, 2015;Varkey et al, 2012). In line with the goals of improving and sustaining programs, some coordinators of mentoring activities have increased the rigor of their assessment by conducting surveys on an annual basis (Bean et al, 2014;Bertram et al, 2015;Cofrancesco et al, 2018;Fox, 2012).…”

“…The other dominant research method applied in both mixed methods and quantitative studies is data analysis of tenure and promotion records. The data analysis usually focuses on the curriculum vitae of protégés and tallies the number of manuscripts submitted and published, grants proposed and awarded, presentations, and other scholarly activities after participation in the mentoring program (Bertram et al, 2015;Browning et al, 2014;Cofrancesco et al, 2018;Huenneke et al, 2017;Marcellino, 2011;Mayer et al, 2014;Minnick et al, 2018;Varkey et al, 2012;Weaver et al, 2013). Three studies analyze tenure and promotion data to determine years to promotion (Morrison et al, 2014), number of successful tenure applications (Bertram et al, 2015;Huenneke et al, 2017), and retention of the protégés (Huenneke et al, 2017).…”

“…The qualitative assessment methods applied most frequently in the higher education studies of faculty mentoring are interviews with protégés (Carney et al, 2016;Thomas et al, 2015) or both mentors and protégés (Hubball et al, 2010), and focus groups (Bell & Treleaven, 2011;Hubball et al, 2010;Marcellino, 2011). None of the interview questions are shared in the publications, which means they are unavailable for peer review or re-use.…”