Session topics and their objectives:-
Session 1: Effective Communication
- Provide constructive feedback
- Use multiple strategies for improving communication (in person, at a distance, across multiple mentees, and within appropriate personal boundaries)
- Engage in active listening
- Communicate effectively across diverse dimensions, including varied backgrounds, disciplines, ethnicities, and positions of power
- Identify different communication styles
Session 2: Aligning Expectations
Mentors will have the knowledge and skills to
- Listen to and consider the expectations of their mentee in the mentoring relationship
- Consider how personal and professional differences may impact expectations
- Clearly communicate expectations for the mentoring relationship
- Align mentee and mentor expectations
Session 3: Assessing Understanding
- Assess their mentee’s understanding of core concepts and processes and ability to develop and conduct a research project, analyze data, and present results
- Identify reasons for a lack of understanding, including expert-novice differences
- Use multiple strategies to enhance mentee understanding across diverse disciplinary perspectives
Session 4: Addressing Equity and Inclusion
- Increase understanding of equity and inclusion and their influence on mentor-mentee interactions
- Recognize the impact of conscious and unconscious assumptions, preconceptions, biases, and prejudices on the mentor-mentee relationship and acquire skills to manage them
- Identify concrete strategies for learning about and addressing issues of equity and inclusion
Session 5: Fostering Independence
- Define independence, its core elements, and how those elements change over the course of a mentoring relationship
- Employ various strategies to build their mentee’s confidence, establish trust, and foster independence
- Create an environment in which mentees can achieve goals
Session 6: Self-Efficacy and Ethical Awareness
- Articulate ethical issues they need to discuss with their mentees
- Clarify their roles as teachers and role models in educating mentees about ethics
- Manage the power dynamic inherent in the mentoring relationship
Session 7: Promoting Professional Development
- Identify the roles mentors play in the overall professional development of their mentees
- Develop a strategy for guiding professional development using a written document
- Initiate and sustain periodic conversations with mentees on professional goals and career development objectives and strategies
- Engage in open dialogue on balancing the competing demands, needs, and interests of mentors and mentees (e.g., research productivity, coursework, creativity, independence, career preference decisions, non-research activities, personal development, and work-family balance)
Session 8: Work-Life Integration and Articulating a Mentoring Philosophy
- Reflect on mentoring action plans
- Articulate planned action(s)
- Explore resources to support action plan(s)