Messages to Mentors

I was thinking for a while about what it means to be in a mentor-mentee relationship, and what the unwritten rules of this relationship are. As thoughts started to pile, I thought I should put them on paper and post here - to facilitate your reflections around the topic.

So here it is - my finalized (but not final) list of messages to you, mentors:

Mentorship is a two-way street: you will get as much as you give. I've heard this saying a few days back, and the idea has stuck with me: "What I am to be, I am now becoming." No one expects that you are perfect in your mentor role, shortcomings are essential, and growth is an important component of this process. Mentorship requires courage, not only from a mentee, but also from a mentor, to be able to face and acknowledge their own shortcomings. Be okay to receive feedback. Think back to your experiences working with students so far. What have you learned from these experiences? What have you learned about yourselves as individuals and as mentors? Are you okay with the feedback you've been getting so far (verbal or non-verbal), and how does that influence your own growth as academic mentors?

This leads to the next line of messages:

As a mentor, you have to know yourself. You have to know what you stand for, and that will influence what your mentee stands for. You have to know what your values are, and how you communicate them. Do you value honesty, work ethic, or integrity most? How do your behaviors communicate these values? Are you explicit about them in your messages, attitudes, and actions? Continue reflecting on these as each one of them makes impact on your students.

As a mentor, you also have to think how you cultivate the stories. Are you curious about your mentee? If you like someone, they will like you back. Be available (I know it's hard, but make time to be available). Strive to make those around you important. This note is especially important, and it ties back to our previous discussion around building the self-worth and self-confidence, breaking stereotypes, and facilitating the trusting relationship with your mentee.

We are who we are through other people. Think of mentors in your own lives, people that affected your decisions, choices, paths. What were the messages they sent you? What sort of behaviors they cultivated in you? How did they go about influencing you? Think of your own experiences as mentees and how these experiences affected your current mentoring relationships. Think of the messages you find yourself repeating to your mentees. How did they come to life, and how did you grow into accepting them as your own?

Lastly, think of the biggest message you send to your students through two-three months or semester of academic mentoring. Are you igniting the life-long learners, individuals passionate about biology/chemistry/math, or those interested in making good? The one thing I've heard the other day that stayed with me: become an interesting person. What is one or two things that will ignite in you that interesting person? College is the time to identify these one-two things, and pave your way to them. I hope this message is also among the many others you send to your mentees.

Breaking Stereotypes

Stereotype threat refers to being at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one's group (Steele & Aronson, 1995). Research shows that just being stereotyped negatively is enough to bring down performance. As Steele suggests, "a mind trying to defeat a stereotype leaves little mental capacity free for anything else we're doing"(p. 123). For instance, in the study conducted by Steele and Aronson,  African-American students performed worse than whites when students reported their race right before the test. However, when the race wasn't reported, no differences in GRE performance between white and black students were found. Most important, stereotype threat is most dramatic for those students who are most skilled and most interested in excelling at what they are being tested on.

Are there any ways in which stereotypes can be defeated? Steele reported the following findings of his research:
"By changing the way you give critical feedback, you can dramatically improve minority students’ motivation and receptiveness.
By improving a group’s critical mass in a setting, you can improve the members’ trust, comfort and performance in the setting.
By simply fostering intergroup conversations among students from different backgrounds, you can improve minority students’ comfort and grades in a setting.
By allowing students, especially minority students, to affirm their most valued sense of self, you can improve their grades, even for a long time. By helping students develop a narrative about the setting that explains their frustrations while projecting positive engagement and success in the setting, you can greatly improve their sense of belonging and achievement". (p. 216)

What are the ways you may apply this in Academic Mentoring? Here are a few of my ideas:

- Think of mistakes as opportunity for learning ( think growth mindset!).
- Develop trusting mentoring relationship: when interactions between people from different backgrounds have learning from each other as a goal, the trust is fostered. If you truly believe in the success of your mentee, students will feel that they are not judged by the bad stereotype about their group.
- Set high standards from the beginning: by demanding a lot, you at the same time make your students believe that they are capable of meeting those demands.
- Talk to your students about things outside of the course content: relations with family, friendships, experiences in classes, fraternities and sororities, and the like.
- Build the sense of self: e.g., in the beginning of semester, have your students write a brief paragraph on the value most important to them, explaining why they thought this value was an important one.
- Give examples from your life: let them know that you have also gone through the stress of college life.
- Have the positive outlook no matter how hard things get.
- If you work with more than one student, encourage your students to study together outside of your mentoring sessions. Think back to your readings about different groups of students studying differently and how that affected their performance. Asian students, who studied in groups, formal and informal, and made little distinction between their academic and social lives, did better than White and African-American students.

More thoughts on application of Steele's research in academic mentoring settings?

More on the notion of the "stereotype threat": Steele, C. (2010). Whistling Vivaldi: How stereotypes affect us and what we can do.