Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Mentoring

Today I am blogging to myself. You see, I know I wrote several brilliant ?? comments giving advice to new faculty and my thoughts on mentoring new faculty, and ... well ... now I am a mentor to a new faculty member. So what was it I said?

Took more time to find these than I thought it would.

Mentoring New Faculty (April 2008)
Concerning my thoughts about our college's mentoring program.

Advice for a New Professor (March 2009)
Includes links to two other articles and a few thoughts of my own.

New Adjunct (July 2007)
Although directed at a question from a first-time teacher, some of this is probably relevant in many situations.

I'm sure there are others (like in my "jobs" area or dialogs on other blogs), but I don't have time to track those down right now. Will update later when I think of one.

Dean Dad on becoming an Administrator
On one level, completely irrelevant. On another, totally relevant. Anyone in a new job has to learn, and listening is how you learn. For that matter, even people who have been on the job for years still have things to learn. Listening is how learning happens.

2 comments:

GMP said...

Dr. Pion, for what it's worth, here's another link regarding mentoring tenure-track faculty, albeit based on my experiences in an R1 institution. Cheers

Doctor Pion said...

Thanks! That is helpful along with confirmation that "mentee" might be an actual word.

My first advice, and possibly most useful so far based on the reaction of my mentee, was to use a naming scheme for folders that would auto-sort alphabetically into chronological order, and to group them by type of course (gen ed, majors) at one higher level. Putting Fall first, bad. Putting year first, good.

That and to start a version of next semester's syllabus, schedule, etc on the fly RIGHT NOW so you touch things up as you go while they are fresh in your mind.