Mentoring program helps young faculty feel at home

By Bruce E. Beans

After earning her doctor-ate in clinical child psychology at the University of Kansas two years ago, Kelly Champion found herself in an entirely different environment as a tenure- track teacher at Gustavus Adolphus College, a liberal arts college in St. Peter, Minn. For guidance, she turned to APA's Div. 2 (Society for the Teaching of Psychology) Mentoring Service, an 18-month-old program that pairs experienced professors with beginning or junior faculty members throughout the country.

The service matched her with James H. Korn, PhD, a professor of psychology with a quarter-
century of teaching experience
at St. Louis University. Primarily through e-mails and mailed materials, Champion has received reliable, independent advice on everything from in-class teaching techniques to how to expand her network of teaching colleagues.

This type of faculty-faculty mentoring is not new. On many campuses, either formally or informally, mentoring is an entrenched custom that runs the gamut from sporadic professional counseling on overcoming first-year teaching anxieties and negotiating the tenure gauntlet to close personal relationships.

But what distinguishes the Div. 2 service and mentoring programs cropping up at schools that include University of Wisconsin campuses is that, instead of linking young professors with a mentor within their department, the programs provide advisers from altogether different departments or institutions. Thus, mentees receive counsel free of the political considerations that sometimes engulf college departments.

"When you are completely new and don't know the colleagues or environment you've gotten yourself into, you're taking big risks to show too much concern or lack of assurance about your teaching," says Champion. "The long-distance, near anonymity of the program offers somewhere safe to take your questions."

"Having an outside mentor provides a safe haven, someone to use as a sounding board," agrees Rhea Steinpries, PhD, a former mentee who is now an associate professor of psychology--and mentor--at the Uni-versity of Wisconsin­Milwaukee.

Establishing a network

For many psychologists, the academic adviser who oversaw their doctoral work continues to mentor them throughout their careers. But today that is not a given, particularly for people who take jobs at institutions that are radically different from their graduate schools.

The Div. 2 service was launched to fill such voids for beginning or junior faculty, as well as for graduate teaching assistants. So far, around two dozen mentees have taken advantage of the program.

Champion has queried Korn on topics ranging from generating lively classroom discussions to writing good test questions. After a year and a half at Gustavus Adolphus, she has found her department colleagues to be very supportive, and still maintains links with her advisers at the University of Kansas. But Korn has proved a welcome additional resource.

"Jim has sent me hands-on advice, things he has written or liked, and it's been very helpful," she says.

He has also encouraged her to be active in Div. 2, and suggested Div. 2 members with whom she should acquaint herself.

"It's very important for one's professional career development to establish a good network of what I would call 'teaching types,' and you do that by becoming involved in the profession," agrees Stephen F. Davis, PhD, another Div. 2 program mentor who is a professor of psychology at Emporia State University in Emporia, Kan.

Champion is typical of the people using the Div. 2 Mentoring Service, according to a recent survey of program participants conducted by Dana S. Dunn, PhD, and Stacey B. Zaremba, PhD, of Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pa. The mentees are overwhelmingly women in tenure-track positions who have sought mentoring for reasons ranging from seeking advice on teaching and career planning to wanting to be connected with other minority professors.

Addressing women's needs

Women may be more likely to take advantage of mentoring programs such as Div. 2's because they frequently don't have access to within-department mentoring, according to Nadya Fouad, PhD, professor in the department of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin­Milwaukee (UWM), and the founder of the university's mentoring program. The program pairs new faculty with mentors in departments other than their own. And because of mentees' concerns that having a mentor may be perceived as a weakness, mentoring relationships are confidential.

When UWM started its mentoring program six years ago, it was designed solely for junior faculty women to address the fact that men were achieving tenure more quickly, and overall more successfully, than women. Within a year, it opened to men and today half of all new mentees are men. Over 80 percent of all new faculty join the program. But women stick with the program longer than most men--often because men find mentoring within their department while women don't, says Fouad.

UMW's mentoring program helped Steinpreis gain her bearings within a department where she was the only one of 14 faculty members without tenure.

"I spent my first six months shell-shocked, afraid I couldn't do what they hired me to do," recalls Steinpreis.

The mentoring program hooked her up with Audrey Begun, PhD, an associate professor in the School of Social Welfare. Begun gave her both political and professional advice, then asked Steinpreis to co-author an internal research grant, which was funded. That experience, says Steinpreis, enabled her to become a principal investigator on research funded by, among others, the National Institute of Mental Health, and led to her achieving early tenure in five years.

"After she learned some basic grantsmanship skills," says Begun, "she took off on her own and was very successful."

A survey of Milwaukee mentors and mentees released last year indicates the program is most successful in creating a supportive environment, helping mentees develop entry-level survival skills, understand career management and advancement and balance their various university responsibilities. But participants agree that the program could do a better job of enhancing the mentees' research and scholarship competencies and political skills. And mentees said that they would appreciate more help with teaching.

Looking for mentors

Critical to any good mentoring program is the quality of the mentors. And the Div. 2 Mentoring Service is always looking for more seasoned faculty willing to participate, says the program's new director, Drew Appleby, PhD, chairman of psychology at Marian College, in Indianapolis.

Helping young faculty develop can be rewarding for the mentor as well as the mentee, says Davis.

"If you've done something--in my case for more than 30 years--you can fall into a trap of doing it over and over again the same way until someone younger says, 'Hey, could you do it this way?' They come up with some very new, fresh ideas," he says.

But the rewards also extend beyond self-renewal. "Why do any of us teach?" Davis asks rhetorically. "Because we can see that we have made a positive contribution to someone's life."

Korn, Champion's mentor, agrees. "My main interest now is preparing the next generation of teachers of psychology by helping new teachers find their way."

Bruce E. Beans is a writer in Warrington, Pa.

To volunteer as a Div. 2 mentor, please send an e-mail with your name, phone number, e-mail address and the classes, issues, methods and topics you'd like to share to Drew Appleby (appleby@marian.edu).



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