The Wiley International Handbook of Mentoring

24Closing the Mentorship Loop

Susan Ferguson, Andrea Kent, and André Green

University of Alabama, USA

Colleges of Education enjoy the recent classroom expertise of faculty who have simultaneously completed doctoral programs and gained tenure in P‐12 settings. Although experiences differ from case to case, some newly hired faculty members have been out of the P‐12 environment for as little as two years, while others have been out of the classroom for four to five years as they were full time graduate students matriculating through their doctoral program when they bring their research‐into‐practice to teacher preparation programs. This phenomenon lends strength to current classroom pedagogical practices in preparing future teachers, but some junior faculty who have had limited experience in full time higher education settings likely experience a shift in focus when entering tenure track positions. In the P‐12 setting the focus is solely on teaching, but in higher education faculty must be proficient in three areas: teaching, research, and service. Further, there is simply a different culture in higher education than in the P‐12 environment, including the measures of success, level of autonomy, and, arguably, social interaction (Dimidjian, 2002). Junior faculty must be able to embed these areas of success in the three broad areas of teaching, research, and service as these are the places where they will be externally evaluated through a promotion and tenure process.

Teaching ...