A mentor is a person who basically advises a less experienced person. A mentor help one’s to build trust and to change one’s behavior in a positive direction. The role of a mentor is to be dependable, engaged, authentic, and turned it into the needs of the mentee.
Whereas, the concepts of mentorship for Institute faculty vary considerably. More recent concepts of mentoring would propose that effective faculty mentoring should comprise both formal and informal relationships with a broad array of professional colleagues (mentoring networks, constellations, distributed mentoring, partnerships).
The mentoring can furnish guidance and multidimensional viewpoints on developing modern academic careers. It may curtail the power dynamics often present within the junior-senior pairing, and can contain individuals within and outside of academic environments. The profitable mentoring relationships expect active and committed engagement on the part of both mentor and mentee.
A new teacher or a lecturer desires to have a strategy to attract and retain students’ attention and a certificate or a degree cannot give this skill. A mentor can teach this skill very well during his/her mentoring. Mentoring can prove to be a beneficial tool for improving the capabilities of the teaching faculty. A Mentor has the potential to work on areas like Stress management, Time management, Creativity, and Counseling and build confidence in a faculty member. A group of experienced and motivated faculty can be recognized in every institution and they can be selected as a mentor to a few new novices.
Mentoring is very essential in the overall achievement of the junior faculty. Mentors can facilitate by co-authoring and offering positive acknowledgment in research projects, paper presentations, conferences, and seminars. Mentoring helps in the retention of faculty by settling conflicts at the beginning stage. The mentee can also add value by coming up with new ideas and approaches that can improvise teaching practices. Mentoring can also help the junior faculty in prioritizing his responsibilities like teaching, research, invigilation, valuation, paper setting, etc. Mentoring would not only help in achieving professional milestones but also help in accomplishing a sense of camaraderie across departments.
There are chances to enhance the processes of mentorship, the functions, and behaviors that support mentees in learning discipline-specific, professional, and cultural skills and helping them to navigate toward becoming a successful professional in a given field. Effective mentorship involves skill (i.e., competency-based and intentional preparation by academic institutions of their mentors to be effective) as well as support, incentives, and evaluations of the degree of effective mentoring practices. As with any complex skill, individual mentors and mentees will have different levels of acquired skills, and everyone can improve their skills with instruction, practice, and feedback, including ongoing self-reflective processes that encourage intentional practices.
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Do Indian Institute Need Faculty Mentoring:
Due to the coronavirus outbreak, lockdown announced by the government, online classes is the only solution to semester this semester of the students.
Moreover, most of the teaching staff of Indian Institutes are 50+ and are not aware of modern technology, as a result, they are finding some difficulties to teach their students through online mode. Therefore, proper mentoring should be provided to the faculty members in order to tackle their problems.
With online education, a rising force on the market, more ambitious individuals than ever before are finding themselves inspired to launch an online course of their own. Still, for many of these potential teachers, the first hurdle is learning how to teach a course.
If a teacher never taught a class before, there are some fundamentals they should be familiar with before they begin and even if they have taught a course, doing so for the first time online is a different experience.
How Mentor Will Help and what will be the various strategies points
A mentor will simplify the concepts to make online teaching an easy way. A mentor can teach the faculty members, how to teach online- the ways like proper use of online apps such as Google Meet, Zoom, Google Classroom, etc. They can also teach them how to accept assignments online which will help both the teachers and the students, this step will make their jobs easier.
The mentor can teach the faculty various strategies points such as:
• Do not leave the class with their devices keep them engage in any number of teacherly activities: explaining, guiding, asking, illustrating, answering questions. You arrive early to set up for class. You stay a few minutes afterward to talk one-on-one with a student who needs extra support. You’re present and actively involved. You’re there for your students.
• Your teaching style can get lost in interpretation in an online classroom. However, this is starting to change, it is still the case that a fundamental means of communication in an online course is the written word. Don’t let all this to change your teaching style to be yourself.
• In physical class you can get vibes if the students are understanding the concepts of not but when students are taking a class at home, puzzling over your description of complicated theory, you’re not there in real-time to answer their confusion. You can’t notice in class online if they lost their attention or when the instructions given by are clear or t. Yet you have to help them almost as you would in a campus-based classroom.
- Try to think like students, they usually get confused, frustrated, and disengaged because when they didn’t get proper study material. Refer them to good books and notes to read.
• Try to explain your expectations more, if you just simply write it, how they are going to understand what do you want from them. Without explaining more about what you are looking for and what students should do to succeed.
• Try to explain the concepts with relatable examples. Students generally understand the concepts more smoothly if a perfect example is given by an educator.
Thus, faculty mentoring is necessary for Indian Institutes for a better future of youngster and better career of faculty members.
also read: UGC DIRECTS TO SET UP A HELPLINE NUMBER FOR STUDENTS’ MENTAL HEALTH
