Introducing the Duke Faculty Mentoring Commons

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Most academics don’t need to be told that mentoring is important. Many of us can point to one or more transformative mentors who had an outsized positive impact on our careers. There’s plenty of research that demonstrates the positive influence of mentoring on everything from degree completion, to a student’s sense of wellness and flourishing, to career satisfaction post-graduation. Mentoring is particularly needed in moments of uncertainty like the current one. How might we need to grow as mentors, to meet this moment and to meet the increasingly complex needs of our mentees?

Faculty mentors and grad student mentees want to talk about mentoring — just not always with each other. As a professional coach who worked with graduate students before transitioning to coaching faculty, I am struck by how often people used our confidential sessions to work through issues in their mentoring relationships. Grad students or faculty would typically initiate a coaching conversation about mentoring with me. So often, when those sessions went well, the person being coached would realize the importance of better communication with their mentor (or mentee). This often led to follow-up conversations between mentors and mentees that were newly open, trusting and constructive.    

Everybody needs a confidential space sometimes, but if we mostly talk about mentoring in private, we remain embedded in a culture that isn’t conductive to open dialogue or innovations in how we mentor students with evolving needs. 

We need to talk more, and more publicly, about mentoring. Happily, there are formal conversations, programs and even trainings to support faculty mentoring, both at Duke and elsewhere. To complement these efforts, and to pull the conversation around mentoring outside localized institutional pockets where it so often happens, Duke Graduate School and the Office for Faculty Advancement are launching a new blog series, The Duke Faculty Mentoring Commons.  

We hope this series will promote transparency and a more robust exchange of ideas and promising practices about graduate student mentoring across the university. To this end, we hope to highlight: 

Excellence in mentoring. We invite faculty to share anecdotes and reflections on their experiences as mentors (or mentees!), highlighting strategies or innovations that had positive impact and might also be useful for other faculty mentors. 

Evolutions in mentoring. We invite reflections on how faculty can mentor well beyond the “traditional” format of the 1:1 mentoring dyad. For example, many research PIs and lab directors find it especially challenging to mentor people in a group setting. How can you mentor equitably and effectively in group and team settings — without burning yourself out?

Extending mentor innovations at scale. Have you been involved in developing or supporting a formal program, either to directly support mentees — such as a peer mentoring program — or to strengthen existing cultures of graduate student mentoring within a program or school? Tell us about it! 

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For faculty reading along, I ask two things of you. 

• First, look for future posts in our series, and consider sharing them within your own networks. 
• Secondly, we invite you to write for the blog. 

At this point you may be thinking to yourself, “I barely have time to mentor my grad students! Why would I set aside time to write about it, too?” I’ll offer three reasons here: 

To quote Duke professor Toril Moi, “writing is thinking.” We learn to do things better by reflecting on them, and writing is a powerful form of personal reflection. 

Too often, mentoring effort is invisible and therefore unacknowledged. A lot of faculty mentor through informal channels, and sometimes they don’t even consider it “mentoring.” And formal evaluation processes for tenure and promotion aren’t well set-up to encourage or reward even formal faculty mentoring efforts. Writing a blogpost won’t win you promotion either, but it’s one way to quantify and communicate the great work you’re doing as a mentor.

Non-scholarly communications can have immediate impact. Many faculty, especially at midcareer, feel increasingly stymied by scholarly and academic publishing conventions that constrain how they say things and who they say them to. Writing about your experiences in the form of a widely-disseminated blogpost can be a great way to unlearn habits that may no longer serve you — such as jargony prose — and build your confidence in making forays into public scholarship. (In my case, a blogging habit led to writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education and then a book contract.) If you find yourself wishing that more or different groups of people knew about you and your work, here’s an opportunity! 

If you’re ready to begin writing — or, if you simply have questions about how to mentor more effectively as a graduate faculty member, please reach out to me anytime at maria.wisdom@duke.edu.