Guidelines on Faculty Mentoring Programs - Office of the Provost and Senior Vice President

Purpose

The purpose of these guidelines is to establish a structured and supportive mentoring program for faculty members aimed at enhancing the sense of community, improving research and teaching effectiveness, and enhancing retention rates. These guidelines, based on research and best practices, will establish the principles, processes, and responsibilities associated with faculty mentoring across Tufts University.

It is in this spirit that The Office for the Vice Provost for Faculty puts forward general guidelines for schools, departments, centers, and institutes at Tufts University to meet their own unique needs and context when thinking about faculty mentoring programs. These guidelines are meant to be baseline standards as we understand that each school may develop its own unique approach. In fact, we encourage units to think broadly. To support and encourage schools to develop and sustain mentoring initiatives, the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty can aid in the consultation and design of programs. To have consistency across mentoring experiences across various units at Tufts, we have drawn from the literature and models from other institutions on effective mentoring to create the guidelines below.

Rationale

An effective mentorship program is an essential element for a university to ensure a thriving faculty. The mentoring of faculty can offer a range of benefits including a sense of community, enhanced research and teaching effectiveness, and improved retention rates. While high-impact mentoring programs are not a panacea for the challenges faculty members face, they are an important part of creating a supportive environment. Although mentoring requires significant effort from faculty whether they serve as mentors or mentees, it can also be mutually rewarding, and the Office of Vice Provost for Faculty hopes that all faculty will share in the responsibilities to support one another.

Faculty mentoring programs help ensure Tufts’s commitment to a supportive and collaborative environment where faculty can continue to push the boundaries of how they teach, learn, and conduct research. These guidelines are meant to be baseline guidelines as we understand that each school may develop its own unique approach.

Mentoring Process

Recommended Structure:
1. Programs are most likely to be successful when schools designate an individual with the responsibility for oversight of mentoring efforts. This person should take the lead to match mentees, solicit feedback, and perform assessments of mentoring efforts. Schools can determine the individual and office where these responsibilities should be held. If appropriate, these responsibilities can be delegated to the department level. However, one person in each school should be a point of contact for mentoring efforts.
2. Mentoring opportunities should be available to all faculty, regardless of title and rank.
  1. Mentoring should be required for all newly hired continuous term faculty through the first five years post tenure and/or promotion.
  2. Faculty who are full and part-time lecturers should be able to request mentorship if they so choose.¹
  3. Mentoring opportunities, while optional, should be made available for mid-career and senior faculty.
3. Schools should hold regular collective events for mentors and mentees to gather and to learn important information that may be relevant to their success, including available research and teaching resources, and promotion and tenure guidelines.
4. Faculty mentoring requires significant time and effort. As such, mentoring efforts should be considered in faculty review processes.
Goals of Faculty Mentoring: All mentoring efforts should be consultative and not evaluative, emphasizing skills and practices that are relevant for the rank, title, and responsibilities of a faculty member. Below is a list of potential areas that faculty mentorship can focus on. Mentees should only attempt to strive for those goals that are most relevant and important for their success.
1. Getting to Know the Institution. Understanding the academic culture of departments, programs, schools/colleges, and the institution; identifying resources to support research and teaching; and creating a trusted network of junior and senior colleagues.
2. Excelling at Teaching. Finding support for teaching in areas such as course development, pedagogical methods, support for clinical teaching, teaching tools and technologies, interdisciplinary curricula, learning assessment, or reflecting on teaching evaluation.
3. Succeeding at Professional Service. Understanding various professional service roles; finding professional service work that aligns with your goals; and balancing service work with research and/or teaching demands.
4. Excelling at Research, Scholarship, and/or Artistic Production. Developing a research/writing/artistic plan; identifying sources of internal and external funding; soliciting feedback on research, manuscripts, artworks, exhibitions, community-based work, and other forms of research that fall under a faculty member’s discipline; dissemination of scholarship; setting up and maintaining a successful workspace; identifying external reviewers.
5. Succeeding in Clinical Work. Running a successful clinic; supporting students and residents in the clinic; managing time effectively; demonstrating competent and compassionate patient care.
6. Understanding Tenure and Promotion. Understanding of the tenure and promotion processes (for all ranks where promotion is possible); learning about the criteria for performance evaluation; finding support in developing the promotion dossier; soliciting feedback on the quality and quantity of work.
7. Developing Professional Networks. Forging career-enhancing relationships with faculty (at Tufts and/or outside the institution) who share similar interests, challenges, and/or opportunities.
8. Adapting to New Work Expectations. Understanding the roles and responsibilities of a new position, promotion, or the changing research, scholarship and teaching environment.
9. Academic Leadership. Understanding new leadership opportunities and roles; learning how to build one’s own leadership skills.
10. Balancing Work/Life. Prioritizing and/or balancing teaching, research, and service; establishing short-term and long-term goals; finding a time management system that works for you; attending to quality-of-life issues such as dual careers, childcare, and affordable housing.
Matching Mentors
1. Individuals responsible for assigning mentees should gather information either through a survey or one-on-one meetings to understand the needs of each faculty member requesting and requiring mentoring.
2. Mentees should have the option to identify potential mentors. While efforts should be made to match mentors with desired mentors, it may not be always be possible due to availability, time, and professional needs.
3. Mentees and mentors should be matched based on intellectual areas of expertise, the expressed goals and needs of a mentee, and availability of a mentor, in consultation with a department chair or program head.
4. For all new faculty, mentors should be identified within the first three months of the faculty member’s appointment.
5. Individuals with oversight of mentoring efforts should track the mentoring responsibilities of each faculty member and ensure the work is distributed equitably.
6. Mentoring responsibilities should be considered within the broader context of a faculty member’s professional service obligations. Those with larger professional service obligations may have less of a load for faculty mentoring.
Roles and Responsibilities for Mentors & Mentees
1. All assigned mentors should aid the mentee in creating a network of mentors beyond the formally assigned mentors. Additional individuals in this mentoring network should include a range of individuals who can support a mentee in all aspects of their professional work, including peer and near peer mentors.²
2. Mentoring of faculty should be the responsibility of all full-time faculty. However, mentoring responsibilities should be tracked by the individual overseeing the program to determine fair and manageable distribution of work. Full-time lecturers can serve as mentors for other lecturers if they so choose. Part-time faculty can serve as a mentor for other part-time faculty members if they so choose. However, there should be no expectation that they serve in such capacity, and they should not be penalized for not doing so.
3. Mentees should be proactive in the relationship, including setting goals for the relationship, agendas for the meeting, producing any necessary reports.
4. All mentors and mentees should meet at least four times per year, to ensure the development of a relationship among all individuals.
5. It may be helpful for mentees and mentors to agree on a mentoring plan with stated goals for the relationship. Additional details and examples of this will be provided later.
6. For all tenure-track, Professors of the Practice, and/or promotion eligible faculty, the mentor should help support and guide the faculty member in preparing their promotion or 5^th year review case unless another preparator is named or unless the candidate for promotion’s department / program normally fulfills this role.
7. The case preparator should advise the candidate, mentor and the department on how to prepare for potential complications in a case. For example, if a candidate’s research is all multi-authored and the candidate’s contributions are not self-evident, care should be taken to clarify the mentor’s contributions this point.
8. Mentors and mentees should agree upon a plan for the termination of the relationship prior to the beginning of the partnership.
9. Any termination of the relationship should be communicated to individuals who have oversight of the mentoring program.
10. If deemed appropriate, a mentee and mentor who have terminated a relationship can be reassigned.
11. There should be no penalty to the mentee or mentor for the termination of a relationship.
University Support
1. The Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty will offer training materials and sessions for faculty.
2. The Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty will provide examples of mentoring plans, reports, and other documents.

If you have questions or would like additional guidance, please contact the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty. We are happy to support your work.