Building Meaningful Mentoring Relationships

Ian Althouse

At the CTL this semester, I have the opportunity to run a workshop alongside my co-facilitator Stuart Duncan in which we will explore a teaching fellow’s role beyond the classroom. One of these roles can and likely will be developing a mentoring relationship with our students and that’s what has inspired this blog post that you’re reading now!

In preparation for this workshop, I wanted to see what others had been saying about mentoring especially as it pertained to academia. As it turned out, the last few years have seen much discussion of mentoring in academia. Time and again, authors discussed the same two questions: how does one mentor well, and how does one become a mentor? From this pair of questions, there has even arisen a debate about what we mean when use the word mentor. Are we discussing an active verb, to mentor, or an inactive noun, a mentor?

           

I want to think about that debate for a moment. If we conceive of mentoring as a verb, that puts a lot, if not all, of the agency in the hands of the mentor. This idea gives me pause because it turns the mentee into a passive recipient of the mentor’s guidance. Shouldn't our mentees be active learners? And yet, I don’t believe an effective mentor can ever be, like a noun, entirely inactive.

           

In the end, what I concluded was that trying to define this word as noun or verb was insufficient. Mentor is too rich a word. We need to embrace that mentor can be either active or inactive as the situation demands. A student seeks out his or her mentor. In this, the mentor is inactive. However, once in the role of mentor, the mentor transforms into an active participant in the mentee’s life.

But if we can’t solely discuss mentoring as a verb, and if agency in this relationship is divided between mentors and mentees, how do we become mentors? If students need to seek us out, we need to show that we are ready and willing to be found. That means we need to be approachable. We need to show them that we are here, we are present, and we are listening.

So, as I read through various articles, I compiled a list of the things that we, as teaching fellows or as professors, can do or keep in mind to show our availability in fostering meaningful mentor-mentee relationships:

·      Chatting with students: This may not always have to do with academics and may not be a formal meeting in your office, but consider accompanying a student to their next class to continue a conversation or grab a coffee with them one afternoon.

·      Confidence, trust, and unanxious expectations: Your mentee needs to find that they feel these elements in their relationship with you; working or meeting with you should not be cause for added stress.

·      Commitment: Following up with students and following through on your word shows your investment in your mentee.

·      Seeing the student holistically: They are not just students in your class, but people with a host of factors affecting their lives.

·      A student-centered relationship: It’s easy to tell a student your opinions, but mentoring really happens when we listen to our students and help them hear themselves.

·      A collaborative and dialectical relationship: We as mentors must try to learn from our mentees just as they are learning from us—what do they need and how do they work?

·      Time: It takes time to mentor someone, so you’ll need to put time into getting to know your mentee.

·      Cyclical: Good mentors inspire new generations of good mentors.

We consistently see in course evaluations that those instructors who genuinely noticed and paid attention to a student stood out and often factored into a student’s reflections on the university as a whole. What this shows us is that when our students look for a mentor, they are looking for a genuine connection with another person who they trust, respect, and admire. Students are searching for authentic interpersonal relationships everywhere on campus. Our students are seeking connections to people and these relationships are the memories students will carry with them for a lifetime.

If you are interested in reading more about why we should mentor, the state of mentoring in academia, and other instructors’ experiences, I would encourage you to take a look at some of the following links:

“The Difference Mentoring Makes”

“Saving Our Profession, Part 1: Mentoring”

“Spirit Guides: The best teachers and professors resemble parental figures”

“Waiting for Us to Notice Them: This is how we can begin to practice a ‘pedagogy of presence’ in our classrooms”

Adviser, Teacher, Role Model, Friend: On being a mentor to students in Science and Engineering. National Academy of Sciences. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1997.

What's Exciting about Course Design?

Eleonora Buonocore

As a teacher and a graduate student, there is nothing that is more exciting to me than the  possibility of designing my own course. I think many of you will agree! We are here because we love to research and to teach, and designing a new class represents the perfect occasion for merging together the two things we love the most.

This is what draw me to course design: I wanted to become good at creating and developing new and exciting courses for my students. I attended an Advanced Teaching Workshop at the Yale Teaching Center on Course Design back in 2013, and since then I started researching techniques for course design, trying to understand what makes an effective course and how to recreate it. This led me to design my own course and then to propose it as part of the Associates in Teaching (AT) program, for which it was approved in the spring of 2014. Co-teaching a new course that my advisor, Prof. Giuseppe Mazzotta, and I had designed from the very beginning was an exhilarating experience. We used all of the good practices I learned on Course Design: we began with our goals, designed to be student-centered and focused on active-learning objectives; then we created assessment methods that would reflect our goals; and finally, we selected the best material to match our goals and our assessments. We paid particular attention to varying instructional techniques and to appeal to different kinds of learners: each class period included both a PowerPoint presentation, a reading of the text, a student’s presentation and a student-led class-wide discussion. The course was a success, and the students seemed to enjoy it a lot.

I used my AT experience as a way to stress the possibilities that course design opens up to us. When you put time and effort in designing a course, the students notice it!

But it wasn’t until last semester, when I had the opportunity to run an Advanced Teaching Workshop with my co-facilitator Robert Wickham, that I discovered the full potential of Course Design. Specifically, I understood how its core competencies can be applied to all sorts of disciplines, spacing from the humanities to sciences and the social sciences. It was an eye-opening experience, since I could finally see with my own eyes in action what I always instinctively knew: that good teaching techniques are independent from the discipline you are teaching, and that they are not simply innate skills, but can be learned and reproduced. In short, I learned that you can teach how to teach, and specifically how to design a successful course.

If you were unable to come to our workshop, don’t fret! I will quickly summarize here the most important points that we covered during our workshop…

1. Familiarize yourself with the principle of Backward Design: how to design a class starting from your goals and not simply from the material you want to cover. You can find more information on Backward Design here.

2. I cannot stress enough the importance of goal-setting: set goals for your course at the start, and then set specific goals for each class period. What makes a goal good?  Objectives should be specific, clear, and measurable. In particular, it is useful to formulate your goals in an active-learning and student-centered language. Active verbs help!

3. Understand what possibilities are available as assessments (both formal and informal) for your course, and how your choices in assessment should reflect your goals and should correspond to your choice of materials. On available assessment methods, you can find a list of Classroom Assessment Techniques (CAT) here.

4. Finally, take your time to create a course schedule and to develop an appropriate syllabus! Course design is a time-consuming activity that also requires some breathing time in between the initial idea, the planning stage, and the finalized syllabus creation.

Oh, and there are plenty of resources available online on the subject of course design, so do not forget to check the links offered below:

On goal-setting for your course check out this website from University of Berkeley:

http://teaching.berkeley.edu/learning-goals-0#sthash.XCJAzqLx.dpuf

On Backward Design, check out this evaluation and summary of the excellent book Understanding by Design, by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe:

http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/understanding-by-design/

On aligning your assessment methods with your goals, see this website by Carnegie Mellon University:

http://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/design/assessments.html

For a complete guide to course design, consult University of Vanderbilt Center for Teaching website here:

http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/

Webinar on Online Learning and Teaching: A Reflexive Autobiography

Simona Lorenzini

December 3, 2014 marked my debut online. For the first time the Yale Center for Teaching and Learning offered an Advanced Teaching Workshop in a webinar format that I co-facilitated with my fellow Tyler Smith. Webinar: what is it? A friend of mine has suggested this definition: a seminar on the web. I think is the simplest and straightforward definition for a webinar. Personally, I only heard about webinars for the first time a few months ago when I started being interested in online education. As both teacher and researcher, I like challenging myself with new tools and resources and, following my curiosity, I have come across the virtual world of webinars. There is a mare magnum of webinars: you can find a webinar on almost anything, from education to marketing, from technological to cooking tutorials. And many of these webinars are completely free—a feature that speaks to the high level of “democracy” of such tools.

As a Yale Online Teaching Fellow, I had to take some webinars as part of my training for the webinar Tyler and I co-facilitated in December. I have to say that my first experiences with webinars were somehow discouraging. Even if the topic was of interest (mainly about education), I often felt overwhelmed by the content’s delivery. Many of these webinars were lectures of one or two speakers, with one person acting as moderator. After half an hour of talking and slide sharing – when you cannot actually see the speaker – my attention flagged and I started watching time, looking around, and eventually getting distracted. So, when it came to plan our webinar, Tyler and I agreed in approaching it as a traditional CTL workshop. That meant to keep it as interactive, dynamic, and engaging as possible. For me, this was the most challenging part of the webinar. You cannot have a sense of the importance of a physical interaction with the audience until you lack it. In a face-to-face environment, you can easily measure the level of attention of your audience and bring it back by eye contact, direct questions, or just simply by moving around the physical space. However, in a virtual space, everything becomes more difficult. So, the first thing to keep in mind was avoiding a lecture-style webinar. We did not want to lecture our participants about webinars and online learning. Instead, we presented ourselves as facilitators for a discussion about the costs and benefits of online teaching, and we started our webinar with a very successful icebreaker that asked our participants to share their previous experiences with online tutorials. The answers varied from ‘how to tie a bow’ to ‘how to fix a leaking faucet’; this way, we were able to put our participants at ease and open a discussion without presenting ourselves as “experts.”

Going through all the aspects of a webinar (from technical to pedagogical issues) was challenging and rewarding at the same time. I experienced the entire procoess as a learning experience for myself, strongly believing that doing something is the best way to learn something (a pearl of wisdom that comes from my parents).

And so the question arises: what did I learn? Here are my “pearls of wisdom” for developing and conducting a good webinar:

• Surf the net: you will find tons and tons of tutorials, tools, and materials (free!!) on the web. It is a good starting point, especially if you are a newbie.

• Choose the right platform: Google Hangout and Skype are just some of the platforms you can use for hosting a webinar. The good news: they are free. The bad news: they can allow a limited number of participants. Here you can find a list of the most reliable webinar platforms: http://webinar-services.no1reviews.com

• Learn the technology and become familiar with the platform: before the December webinar, I used Google Hangout in many pre-webinar meetings and with my family to become accustomed with tech troubleshooting and interactive apps.

• Work in a team: a successful webinar is often a team project. Even if you are the only facilitator/presenter, it is a good practice to ask for suggestion and help to your colleagues or friends. They can help you with resources, feedback, tech support, and rehearsals.

• Rehearse: before the event, you should rehearse with colleagues and/or friends (maybe from the same location and at the same time of your real event) to be sure that everything will go smoothly, and to allow yourself to feel confident with virtual interactions.

• Have a good lesson plan: you should set your goals and expectations from the very outset. This way the participants can follow you easily and be more focused.

• Treat your webinar like a face-to-face event/workshop: maybe it is the most challenging part because you miss the physical contact with your audience, and you cannot control its attention. But if you do not lose your participants along the way, you must remember that they are there. So…

• … engage your audience: you should avoid lecturing-style webinar by thoughtfully dividing your time between content delivering and interactive learning activities. Interactivity is a good strategy to promote engagement and attention; and engagement is fundamental for a successful webinar.

• Use the chat function to share documents/worksheets, website resources, and links with your participants: the chat app is an excellent tool for live Q&A, small group activities, video clips, and feedback. And last but not least…

• Keep it simple and short: especially if it’s your first experience with a webinar, do not entrap yourself in those cool apps that some platforms allow. Instead, go straight to your goals, deliver not more than two or three topics, and engage your audience in a lively discussion and interactive activity for no more than 50 mins.

The webinar tool is a very flexible technology and it can respond to different specific communicative purposes. It also allows you to break down time and space barriers, making it a more suitable choice in this age of tight schedules. At the same time, missing visual and bodily cues poses a challenge. In my personal experience, facilitating active participation and preventing participants’ distractions were the hardest obstacles to overcome. In a traditional f2f workshop, you can split your participants in small groups (even in pairs), easing the anxiety of talking in front of a large group. That is harder to accomplish in a virtual setting. Of course, you could call on people to speak, but the majority of them could not feel comfortable in being on the spot. This downside of the webinar was counterbalanced by the high appreciation and usage of the chat tool that, surprisingly or not, played an important part in our webinar.

Being an online teacher/presenter is demanding, challenging, and overwhelming in terms of lesson planning, setting clear goals, keeping your audience attentive. However, in the spirit of the CTL’s workshop, I found the December webinar on online teaching to be a stimulating learning experience that I had the privilege to share with my co-facilitator, with the staff of CTL, and, of course, with all of our participants whose precious feedback serves as a helpful tool to rethink and reshape future online workshops.

To my readers: Have you ever taken a webinar? Would you like to take one? I would really enjoy hearing your thoughts and experiences in the comment section below.