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Mentoring New Faculty: How Much, How Often, and How? Abstract

The Department of Technology Systems (TSYS) at East Carolina University has implemented a new faculty mentoring process to enable junior faculty members to learn from senior faculty members as they prepare for a career in academia. Five tenured professors and associate professors in the TSYS department have recently established a new process to mentor faculty members within the department who have begun not yet completed their initial tenure process at a major university. This process includes a series of workshops regarding academic performance expectations during the early stages of an academic career. Our commitment to new faculty takes on several related, yet distinct features. Examples of these initiatives include: 1) reduced workloads for new faculty for the first two years to enable them to generate individual and collaborative research activities, funded grants, and publications, 2) periodic university-wide training to learn policies and procedures that affect day-to-day activities on a college campus, 3) periodic workshops hosted by senior faculty mentors, and 4) one-on-one discussions between senior faculty members and junior faculty members to encourage candid dialogue between professional colleagues. Another feature of the mentorship philosophy is a proposal to the dean of the college to offer newly hired faculty a contractual start date of July 1st each year instead of starting their contract one week prior to the start of fall classes, normally in late August. This additional period of time will be used to train new faculty in essential policies and procedures, to complete a variety of administrative tasks on campus, to get a head start on preparing for classes in the fall, and cleaning up those supplemental tasks that accompany every move to a new location. The goal of this early commitment to new faculty is to reduce the stress associated with preparing for a new course, in a new environment, with a new set of operating procedures. This will also enable the mentorship team to begin the tenure preparation process under a more relaxed and effective environment. This paper will provide specific details of this new mentorship program and its effectiveness thus far.

Introduction

Originally established in 1996 and presently administered by Dr. Dorothy Howse Clayton, the primary mission of East Carolina University’s (ECU’s) “…Center for Faculty Development is to provide faculty members with resources and services that foster and support their efforts to create effective teaching and learning environments”.1 The Center (a) serves as one of the many sources of resources and materials appropriate for the common components of the tenure and promotion process, (b) helps facilitate the annual university-wide teaching awards program, (c) helps facilitate the tenure track probationary term faculty's mandatory classroom observation, (d) facilitates the conduct group sessions, (e) conducts workshops on constructing teaching portfolios, and (f) facilitates the development of research skills and access to research resources. Among the group sessions the Center facilitates is New Faculty Mentoring, a series of group meetings intended to familiarize new ECU faculty members with the institution’s procedures and requirements and to facilitate professional development among interested colleagues. In addition to the New Faculty Mentoring program, ECU offers at least ten other faculty mentoring programs according to ECU’s Faculty Welfare Committee.2 Furthermore, according to the Faculty Welfare Committee,2 of the two hundred and sixty-seven respondents

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Jackson, A., & Chin, R., & Coddington, C., & Petersen, P., & Hamid, F. (2007, June), Mentoring New Faculty: How Much, How Often, And How? Paper presented at 2007 Annual Conference & Exposition, Honolulu, Hawaii. 10.18260/1-2--2459