Comments on: The New Future of Teaching: Graduate Student Mentoring/Deconstructing Framework http://teachingthursday.org/2009/09/03/the-new-future-of-teaching-graduate-student-mentoringdeconstructing-framework/ A Teaching Blog from the University of North Dakota Office of Instructional Development Fri, 27 Apr 2012 16:49:32 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: The Recruiting Paradox: Recruiting and teaching a new generation of graduate students « Teaching Thursdays http://teachingthursday.org/2009/09/03/the-new-future-of-teaching-graduate-student-mentoringdeconstructing-framework/#comment-171 Thu, 25 Feb 2010 13:37:31 +0000 http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/the-new-future-of-teaching-graduate-student-mentoringdeconstructing-framework/#comment-171 [...] It’s also—and this is important—growing. This blog has been doing a great job exploring how to teach these new graduate students; I thought I would offer a connected perspective to your conversation. Those students, after all, [...]

]]> By: Anne Kelsch http://teachingthursday.org/2009/09/03/the-new-future-of-teaching-graduate-student-mentoringdeconstructing-framework/#comment-73 Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:24:23 +0000 http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/the-new-future-of-teaching-graduate-student-mentoringdeconstructing-framework/#comment-73 To follow up on Dean Benoit’s remarks, I’d like to comment on an observation made in the Alice Clark Mentoring Program for new faculty here at UND. Each year I am amazed at how little in their graduate training has been formally done for new PhDs to actually preparing them for the entirety of the job of being a tenure track faculty member. Very few have had any concrete guidance on dealing with that reality and figuring out how to succeed as a new professor. For many—especially those in research intensive fields — there is little preparation for teaching. Most often there is no training in terms of service or advising. And while research is the area where we have the best instruction, most new faculty do not feel well prepared to fulfill their research agenda given the need to establish labs, locate and seek grants, figure out how to manage grad students and understand their departments frequently ill-defined expectations. And this list of duties is just the tip of the iceberg.

So when Joey noted that “Successful mentoring ends with degree completion,” my first thought was that it needs to extend beyond that. We need to think of our graduate students as future colleagues and mentor them in terms of their success in the academic field or profession they are entering. What would you like them to know and do if they were to be an assistant professor entering your department? Teach them that.

I would say that really successful metoring relationships never end, they evole into new colleagial relationships with those who are the future in our fields.

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