Departmental Recommendations for Mentoring Faculty

• Develop a mentoring plan based on the needs and conditions of your particular department (e.g., smaller departments may rely on committee mentoring because of fewer senior faculty mentors or may encourage their faculty to seek mentors from other departments)
• Ensure that the mentoring process is distinct from the annual faculty evaluation process (performance review)
• Identify a Mentoring Coordinator(s) that has an interest in department-wide mentoring and checks in with mentors and mentees periodically
• The department Chair should support a mentoring culture by discussing mentoring in departmental faculty meetings, sharing his/her own mentoring experiences, etc.
• Provide incentives for mentoring such as awards, recognition, financial resources, and service credits
• Clear guidelines and expectations for the mentoring relationships should be established in writing (e.g., frequency of meetings, confidentiality of meetings, and type of support)
• Provide informal opportunities for junior and senior faculty to interact to facilitate the development of mentoring relationships
• Encourage faculty involvement in formal development of mentorship skills – the Office of Graduate Education and the Center for Faculty Excellence/NC TraCS offer an evidence-based, mentorship training curriculum at no charge (http://ogefacultymentoring.web.unc.edu; contact aboconnell@unc.edu or jharrell@med.unc.edu (http://cfe.unc.edu/research/programming-and-events; contact erin_malloy@med.unc.edu or susan_pusek@med.unc.edu)
• Conduct evaluation of the departmental plan/program as well as the individual mentoring relationship on an annual basis. To assist departments in implementing this recommendation, a mentoring evaluation toolkit with example Qualtrics surveys was provided to each department chair by the Mentoring Task Force in March 2017.

Source:

UNC Report of the Subcommittee on Mentorship Regarding Promotion and Tenure of the Provost’s Task Force on Tenure and Promotion

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