Mutual Mentoring Research Articles

АНАЛІТИЧНИЙ ІНСТРУМЕНТАРІЙ МЕНТОРИНГОВОЇ ДІЯЛЬНОСТІ НА ПІДПРИЄМСТВАХ

The article examines the theoretical foundations of mentoring as a system of relationships in which one person (mentor) provides support for new knowledge, development and progress of another person (student, mentee). A study of legislative and institutional support, as well as the results of practical implementation of mentoring as a form of professional socialization at enterprises (MTS Ukraine, Coca-Cola Beverages Ukraine, 3M Ukraine, KPMG in Ukraine, JSC Ukrzaliznytsia, etc.) was conducted. Positive results of mentoring determined the increase in the level of internal system of training of employees, the development of own know-how of enterprises, increasing the level of satisfaction of employees with work, the formation of high-quality intellectual and human resources potential to ensure digital transformations at enterprises, the elimination of conflicts, increasing the level of motivation, the introduction of new rules and traditions of the company, increasing the level of relevance and reliability of Management Information, expanding the network of international contacts between employees (exchange of experience, solutions and ideas), improving the skills of employees and their performance, etc. The disadvantages of implementing mentoring systems of enterprises include resistance from mentors and their unwillingness to share experience with young colleagues, as well as the spread of mentoring practices only for new employees of enterprises, young specialists, beginners in a particular profession, undeveloped feedback between mentor and mentee (mutual mentoring). Using the method of theoretical generalization, analysis and synthesis, the article examines the analytical tools of mentoring activities, which are summarized in four groups: a targeted questionnaire survey of respondents, an online survey in the internet environment, a critical analysis of literature sources and the regulatory framework for the problem, a combination of various methods (questionnaire surveys, interviews, demonstration projects, etc.). In the context of deepening the practice of combining various methods of analysis, in order to increase the effectiveness of mentoring activities, when implementing analytical work, it is recommended to use methods of personnel assessment: 365 degrees method, Hay method, point-factor assessment, assessment center. The article outlines the essence of the recommended methods and points out the advantages of using them when analyzing mentoring systems in enterprises.

Tipping Toward a New Academic Consciousness

The COVID-19 pandemic and racial reckoning of 2020-2021 have led many faculty in higher education to see the profession and their place in it in a new light (Walton, 2022). While people are broadly engaged in a large-scale cultural re-evaluation of work, labor conditions, and equity, this awakening has posed an existential threat to many academics’ senses of identity, purpose, and community. Through autoethnographic narratives, the authors make meaning of this tipping point through the feminist intersections of space, power, and consciousness. The authors explore coaching and mutual mentoring as strategies for creating and holding space for disrupting these norms and expectations and for reimagining mentoring, collaboration, and collective action in ways that respond to our current realities and to changing academic work, moving us toward professional work that supports faculty flourishing.

Amplifying Voices: Investigating a Cross-Institutional, Mutual Mentoring Program for URM Women in STEM

Underrepresented minority women in STEM comprise the faculty group most likely to leave academia. To address this issue we instituted a program called “Amplifying Voices,” a virtual, mutual mentoring program linking four groups of six women across 20 institutions. We facilitated bi-weekly Zoom meetings for two years and evaluated the effectiveness of the program. Participants reported reduced isolation, increased confidence, and enhanced self-efficacy. The groups were considered most successful when comprised of women who had similar career goals, but different perspectives, experiences, academic ranks and institutional affiliations. To inform future mentoring efforts, we identified issues and strategies frequently discussed in meetings.

Mutual mentoring: Effect on faculty career achievements and experiences

Introduction: In an ever-changing academic environment, the traditional model of one senior mentor is no longer sufficient to provide faculty with the interdisciplinary perspective needed for success. We adapted, implemented and examined an interschool/interprofessional Mutual Mentoring Program.Methods: Participants were expected to expand their mentoring networks, formulate career goals and achievement plans, and, achieve concrete career goal(s). Participants were offered a 1-year mentoring network grant. To examine short-term outcomes, we collected participants’ lists of contacts and accomplished goals, and asked for immediate feedback on the program. To examine intermediate outcomes, we conducted 30-min interviews with participants after 1 year of participation. We used quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyze the data from four program cohorts.Results: Thirty-seven faculty participated throughout the four academic years. Participants reported 260 contacts made, and achieved goals related to academic products and outcomes. Eleven participants were interviewed and highlighted professional achievements, the power of the established networks, gained career resources, and the accomplishment of significant personal changes.Conclusions: This approach provides the type of multiple mentoring support that is necessary for today’s academic climate for faculty to obtain their career goals, to demonstrate the institutional commitment to faculty success and to provide avenues for interdisciplinary connections.

Decentering Expected Voices and Visibilities through Connective Learning in a Feminist Transnational Bridging Pilot

This paper outlines the learning opportunities that emerged when international students acquiring English for Academic Purposes joined Canadian undergraduates fluent in English for an Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies. Critical reflections provided by students, course facilitators, and the graduate student researcher were gathered through surveys, interviews, and focus groups that examined experiences of academic internationalization in feminist and language acquisition classrooms, co-designed to engage difference as a valuable resource in community and knowledge-building. Results included development of mutual mentoring relationships across a wide range of educational and cultural backgrounds; honing of international students’ English-language skills through structured, intentional learning opportunities with others fluent in English; deepening awareness of non-western and Indigenous contexts as sites of critical knowledge production; and evidence that international and local newcomers to university campuses have much to offer one another. For everyone involved, there were opportunities to reflect critically on both subject matter and pedagogies of community building; use accessible language to build connections; interrogate knowledge claims emerging from the many contexts that instructors and students brought with them into learning conversations; and practice collaborative knowledge-building by probing the effects of local and global power systems in the learning pathways of students, instructors and institutions.

Collaboration and Gender Equity among Academic Scientists

Universities were established as hierarchical bureaucracies that reward individual attainment in evaluating success. Yet collaboration is crucial both to 21st century science and, we argue, to advancing equity for women academic scientists. We draw from research on gender equity and on collaboration in higher education, and report on data collected on one campus. Sixteen focus group meetings were held with 85 faculty members from STEM departments, separated by faculty rank and gender (i.e., assistant professor men, full professor women). Participants were asked structured questions about the role of collaboration in research, career development, and departmental decision-making. Inductive analyses of focus group data led to the development of a theoretical model in which resources, recognition, and relationships create conditions under which collaboration is likely to produce more gender equitable outcomes for STEM faculty. Ensuring women faculty have equal access to resources is central to safeguarding their success; relationships, including mutual mentoring, inclusion and collegiality, facilitate women’s careers in academia; and recognition of collaborative work bolsters women’s professional advancement. We further propose that gender equity will be stronger in STEM where resources, relationships, and recognition intersect—having multiplicative rather than additive effects.

Combatting professional isolation through mutual mentoring

An online system to be launched soon will help female faculty self-organize into mentoring groups.

Mutual Mentoring for Early-Career and Underrepresented Faculty: Model, Research, and Practice

In the beginning, “Mutual Mentoring” was little more than an idea, a hopeful vision of the future in which a new model of mentoring could serve as a medium to better support early-career and underrepresented faculty. Over time, Mutual Mentoring evolved from an innovative idea to an ambitious pilot program to a fully operational, campus-wide initiative. This article describes the conceptualization, design, implementation, and evaluation of a Mutual Mentoring initiative from 2006 to 2014. Findings indicate that faculty members who participated in this initiative were more likely to regard mentoring as a career-enhancing activity as well as to develop mutually beneficial mentoring relationships than were their non-participating peers.

Mentoring Practices Benefiting Pediatric Nurses

Previous studies examining predictors of pediatric nurse protégé mentoring benefits demonstrated that protégé perception of quality was the single best predictor of mentoring benefits. The ability to identify the mentoring practices that predict specific benefits for individual nurses provides a better understanding of how mentoring relationships can be leveraged within health care organizations promoting mutual mentoring benefits. This descriptive correlational, non-experimental study of nurses at a northeast Ohio, Magnet® recognized, free-standing pediatric hospital advances nursing science by demonstrating how mentoring practices benefit pediatric nurse protégés.

MUTUAL MENTORING AS A TOOL FOR MANAGING EMPLOYEES OF DIFFERENT GENERATIONS IN THE ENTERPRISE

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to characterize mutual mentoring as a tool of intergenerational staff management in the enterprise and to examine the effects of the mutual mentoring in Polish enterprises.Methodology: The research was conducted using a survey on a sample of 250 business representatives from all over Poland. The subjects were mainly CEOs or members of the management staff . The criteria for selection of enterprises for this study were: enterprise size (small, medium, large companies), the age structure of the staff . The aim of the study was to identify the process of mutual mentoring in enterprises – whether it is present and what results or benefits it brings to enterprises and their employees.Findings: Almost 40% of the surveyed employers confirm that in their firms knowledge is transferred between employees: this occurs through teaching junior employees by the senior and more experienced ones and there also occur inverse relations, i.e., junior employees share their knowledge with the senior ones. This leads to formation of the added value both for the employees and the whole business. Employers observe numerous benefits from the implementation of mutual mentoring in their organisations. The main ones include: the acquisition and development of competences and skills by employees, the improvement of work environment conducive to involvement of employees in work and the increase of team motivation.Implications: In the Polish literature on the subject the aspect of mutual mentoring in companies has not yet been discussed. The conclusions of the presented analysis provide a basis for larger and more detailed research and the development of practical recommendations for business managers.Originality/value: The author has presented a unique theory of mutual mentoring as a tool of intergenerational staff management in the enterprise. Mutual mentoring defined as modified version of traditional mentoring and involves the assumption that different generations of employees become each other’s mentors or teachers, thus ensuring mutual substantive and organisational support in the workplace as well as natural transfer of knowledge and experience within the organisation. Author presented original research results: effects of the mutual mentoring in Polish enterprises.

The Resource Team Model: An Innovative Mentoring Program for Academic Librarians

Mentoring is a service activity that librarians must engage in to ensure a smooth integration of new library faculty. This case study describes the process of implementing a new mentoring model approach in an academic library, the Resource Team Model (RTM). The California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) Resource Team is an innovative model of mentoring, coaching, and training which includes a broader network of support for mentors and mentees.1 It is formed by a trinity of mentor librarians with different strengths who mobilize for six months to guide and support one new librarian. The main objectives of this model are to acclimatize the mentee to all areas of librarianship and to the culture of the new organization. The RTM ensures that new librarian mentees have the tools and support to move seamlessly into the fabric of the organization and to flourish professionally as they move towards tenure. The RTM approach is not a group mentoring, a mutual mentoring network, or a mentoring circle model as described in the literature. The advantages and disadvantages of the model are discussed, and the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and pressures from both the mentor and mentee perspective at the CSULB University Library are examined.

Chapter 19: When Mentoring Is the Medium

Campuses across the country are investing considerable time, effort, and expense to replenish their faculty ranks with a new generation of scholars. How can mentoring help these new faculty juggle the many demands of surviving and thriving in academia? And how can institutions frame mentoring as a broader faculty development initiative in which faculty at all stages of the academic career can teach and learn from each other? This chapter addresses these questions by sharing the goals, design, and lessons learned from the Mutual Mentoring Initiative at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Peer to peer mentoring for pre‐tenure faculty in the chemical biology field.

We have developed a Chemical Biology Mutual Mentoring Group as a team‐building initiative to bridge the gap between the physical and life sciences. While many of the current advances in the natural sciences are being made in interdisciplinary areas, faculty are often still hired by traditional departments leading to professional isolation. In the absence of mentoring, pre‐tenure faculty can be pushed away from interdisciplinary research and teaching. We have begun to build a network of mentors to support the development of research and teaching in this chemical biology interface.

Mutual Mentoring in Laparoscopic Urology – A Natural Progression from Laparoscopic Fellowship

The objective of this study is to report a novel system of 'mutual mentoring' that overcomes the limited availability of laparoscopic mentors and allows progression from laboratory and fellowship experience into independent clinical practice. A total of 88 laparoscopic cases were performed during the fellowship. In the first 2 years as consultants, we (AJ and MS) performed 151 cases with mutual mentoring (simple nephrectomy [n = 28], radical nephrectomy [n = 35], nephro-ureterectomy [n = 19], pyeloplasty [n = 31], pelvic LND [n = 21], others [n = 17]). Mutual mentoring has resulted in the successful introduction of laparoscopic services to two hospitals, allowing an exposure to an average of two cases a week. Complication rates are acceptable and objective measures such as conversion rates, operative time and blood loss appear to be improving. Mutual mentoring allows for a greater through-put of cases, a high level of assistance, advice with intra-operative decisions and the potential to 'share' cases, reducing fatigue and increasing experience. It provides significant moral support in the difficult early days of starting the service. Its disadvantages are that it is time consuming and is geographically restrictive. Mutual mentoring has allowed us to introduce a laparoscopic service at our respective hospitals with high case-load acceptable complication rates.

Syneducational1 transactions among students, parents, educators and policy makers: The transdisciplinary program SYNTHESIS2

Modern society is characterized by complexity, uncertainty and fuzziness, and people need to re-examine their strategies as well as their way of thinking as a whole in order to cope with the problems that emerge. This project attempts to reinforce syneducational transactions among people (students, parents, educators, policy makers) who are interested in educational issues and are actively involved in them. Its aim is to actively support the implementation of a transdisciplinary program (SYNTHESIS) from a “mutual mentoring” perspective in an interactive learning environment. Within this framework we can develop the timeless principles of Socratic dialogue together with the modern concepts related to systems theory and knowledge management. A certain research model is suggested for the implementation of the above as well as a protocol for the overall evaluation of the program.

Mutual Mentoring: Co-Narrating an Educative Friendship Between an Education Professor and an Urban Youth

An education professor and a high school student tell the story of their mentoring relationship, focusing on the academic journey of the protege. The narrative attempts to give voice to both mentor and protege as it relates an authentic “win–win” situation for both participants and their families. The narrative is theoretically grounded in the literature describing co-mentoring and network mentoring arrangements that are less unilateral and authoritative, and more bi-directional and relationally-based than traditional mentoring arrangements. The authors contend that since educational achievement and attainment determine to a significant degree one’s participation in the “American Dream,” academic assistance and guidance provide a logical area of emphasis for mentoring our youth. Important recent developments in the youth mentoring movement are also discussed.

John Higham and the Nourishment of Memory

On July 14, 2003, my wife and I enjoyed a lovely dinner in Baltimore with John and Eileen Higham at an elegant, club-like restaurant they had discovered, rather improbably called Louisiana. Although John seemed a bit frail that evening, it still came as a shock on the morning of the 26th when his daughter, Margaret, telephoned to say that John had died in his sleep sometime during the previous night. At dinner on the 14th John mentioned his urgent desire to finish a complex essay on ethnicity and race in recent American history that had been commissioned by the Social Science Research Council. He virtually completed it somewhere near midnight on the 25th and did not wake up the next morning. John had a very strong sense of purpose, and this piece will be an important part of his legacy as an activist historian. I think he may have been aware that closure was not far off. We reminisced at dinner, wondering when John and I had first met and how our friendship had developed so swiftly. Neither one of us could recall. We agreed that it must have been sometime around 1970, give or take a year. I have a considerable stash of letters and postcards from him spanning more than thirty years. (Unfortunately, the flow gets rather thin after the mid-1990s when most of our correspondence took place via e-mail, which I foolishly neglected to save. Sometimes, historians are not the most assiduous archivists.) After a while we not only wrote letters to one another, but alsofor one another when each of us applied for fellowship support from foundations. We read each other's work in draft form, and friendship never tempered John's candor as an acute and tough-minded critic. I will always remain grateful for that. This kind of mutual mentoring is one of the true blessings of membership in our guild. He gave a series of guest lectures at Cornell in the mid-1970s, and in the fall term of 1991 he served as the Newman Visiting Professor of American Studies. My graduate students who took his seminar concerning ethnicity became the beneficiaries of John's sagacity, just as I had been for two decades. Our birthdays happened to fall on consecutive days in October, and our celebratory dinner in Ithaca with our spouses on the 26th that year became a notably festive occasion in our relationship-and in subsequent memories.

“Jumping in”: trust and communication in mentoring student teachers

The purpose of this study was to uncover how two student teacher/mentor teacher pairs made sense of their roles during a year-long field placement. We learned about the ways in which the pairs discussed the idea of “jumping in” as they framed trust and communication as integral components of mentoring in learning to teach. Qualitative data sources informed our analysis of the ways people made sense of their roles in a mentoring relationship and provided participants’ perspectives on involvement in group conversations about mentoring. Implications include: (1) mentoring as “jumping in”; (2) conscious collaboration in learning to teach; and (3) mutual mentoring.

Mutual Mentoring: Designing and Teaching a Linked University/Secondary School Course on Literacy

Describes a collaboration between an innovative high school English course and a college-level course of literacy theory. Describes the collaboration, its goals and outcomes, and benefits. Discusses briefly resisting institutional hierarchies.

Mutual Mentoring: Designing and Teaching a Linked University/Secondary School Course on Literacy

Mutual Mentoring: Designing and Teaching a Linked University/Secondary School Course on Literacy