The Faculty Mentor Program at Gordon State College pairs first-year students (students under 30 credit hours) with faculty in the student’s major area/area of focus. Faculty mentors act as part of the student’s success team. They provide professional and career guidance, encouragement, and help connect students with campus resources. All tenure-track faculty members serve as faculty members. Faculty mentors act to provide services and support that complement the services offered by GSC’s professional academic advisors.
Evaluation Plan and measures: KPIs: 1. The “mentoring” service listed in Navigate appointment summaries. 2. Student survey question asking students to identify their mentor
Baseline measure (for each KPI): 1. One “mentoring” service per mentee, 2. One mentor identified by each student (every student can identify their mentor)
Current/most recent data (for each KPI):Data Incomplete. KPI 1 was just implemented and KPI 2 will be implemented at the end of Fall 2023. Program is only in its third semester.
Goal or targets (for each KPI): 1. One-half “mentoring” services listed for the total amount of mentees. 2. One-half of the total mentees being able to identify their mentor.
Spring 2023 was the first full semester of the Mentor Program at Gordon State College. New GSC students under 30 credit hours were assigned mentors within the first month of the semester. This addition slightly increased the average of 13 students per mentor achieved in Fall 2022. On the mentor side, mentors continued to follow the touchpoint timeline distributed in Fall 2022. Mentors were encouraged to contact and meet with their mentees at critical times in the semester. During this term, GSC saw increased faculty involvement and interest in the program. For example, a college-wide faculty committee (AARFA) met several times to discuss changes to the mentor program and to investigate ways to increase mentor-mentee interaction.
The most significant recommendation that the committee made was to reform the way that mentees are assigned to mentors. Going forward, more faculty stakeholders will be involved in the assignment process. In addition, different departments and schools could design their own ways of assigning students to mentees. For example, the Education faculty at Gordon took a more hands-on approach and divided up mentees among themselves based on whom the faculty had a pre-existing familiarity.
The new approach to assigning mentees was implemented in Fall 2023. However, due to data-related problems, mentees were not assigned to faculty until the third week of the term. This ran contrary to our goal of assigning mentees during the first week of the term (or even before). We were, however, able to have our IT Department create an Argos report so that we can get the list of new students under 30 credit hours much earlier in future semesters. For Spring 2024, we should be able to begin assigning mentees during the first or second week of classes.
One significant adjustment we made during 2023 was the process in which mentees are removed from mentors. The program's purpose is to provide new GSC students with a faculty mentor during their first year when they receive professional advising. Most students, though, are assigned a faculty advisor after they move beyond 30 credit hours. That faculty advisor can then also serve as a mentor for the student. Ideally, a student’s faculty mentor should become their advisor when they move beyond 30 credits. However, due to program changes, faculty shortages in certain areas, and other problems, this does not always happen. As a result, we have established a process for removing mentees from mentors who have moved beyond 30 credit hours and have a different faculty advisor. This is a process we will need to continue to refine and improve.
The final significant change we made was to the way we gather data. Based on our conversations with our EAB Navigate representative, we concluded that the best way to gather data about mentor-mentee interactions was through the appointment summary in Navigate. We then created a “mentoring” service in Navigate and asked faculty to select that service when they completed appointment summaries after meetings with mentors. That way, we could quantify (at least in terms of a base) how many interactions mentors and mentees had. This new approach to gathering data has been problematic due to faculty adoption; many faculty are not completing appointment summaries or selecting the mentoring service after meeting with students. Going forward, we need to better educate faculty on how to use Navigate to document their interactions with mentees.
The most significant step we must take in the year ahead is increasing engagement between mentors and mentees. Above all, this requires substantial communication at all levels. We plan to use global emails and other messaging to explain the program to students. We will also spend more time discussing the program during new student orientations. One thing that could aid this is to assign faculty mentors to mentees before the start of the semester. In addition to communication, we need to increase faculty buy-in by discussing the program and changing the program based on faculty feedback and suggestions.
The second significant step we need to take in the year ahead is in the way we gather quality data. We need to do a better job of getting faculty to complete appointment summaries using the “mentoring” service. In addition, we need to craft surveys that we can send to faculty and students. For example, student surveys could ask how often a mentee met with a mentor and if the mentee found their interactions helpful.
The most significant challenge for the program is related to how useful and effective the program is perceived to be by students. The success of the program requires mutual interest and involvement. We believe that the solution to this challenge lies in data and communication. If we can collect data demonstrating that the program is effective, we can communicate that data to faculty and students and hopefully convince them of the usefulness of mentee-mentor interactions and engagement. As a result, we believe it will take time and effort to brand the program so that both groups see it as something extraordinarily valuable for them to participate in.
Supports Needed: Ideas about collecting data related to the performance of the program. In addition, if there are other platforms/systems (other than EAB Navigate) that other institutions use, that would be helpful to know.
