Scholarship - Exploring Mentoring Relationships in Academic Nursing
Apr 25, 2024Season 3Episode 35
Katie Busb, Claire Burke Draucker
This episode of the NLN Nursing EDge Unscripted Scholarship track features guests Katie Busby and Claire Burke Draucker. Learn more about their work, “Exploring Mentoring Relationships Among Novice Nurse Faculty: A Grounded Theory” and “Mentoring and Academic Nursing from the Perspectives.”
This episode of the NLN Nursing EDge Unscripted Scholarship track features guests Katie Busby and Claire Burke Draucker. Learn more about their work, “Exploring Mentoring Relationships Among Novice Nurse Faculty: A Grounded Theory” and “Mentoring and Academic Nursing from the Perspectives.”
[Music] Welcome to this episode of NLN podcast Nursing EDge Unscripted the Scholarship track. I'm your host, Dr. Steven Palazzo, a member of the editorial board for Nursing Education Perspectives. Nursing EDge Unscripted and our track entitled Scholarship celebrates the published work of select nurse educators from the NLN's official journal, Nursing Education Perspectives and the NLN Nursing EDge blog. The conversations embrace the author's unique perspectives on teaching and learning innovations and implications for nursing program development and enhancement. In this episode, we will discuss the benefits of two mentoring frameworks aimed at novice nurse faculty and experienced nurse mentors. We will discuss the perspectives with my guest today Dr. Katie Ruth Busby, an assistant professor in the Helen and Arthur E. Johnson Beth-El College of Nursing and Health Sciences at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs and Dr. Claire Burke Draucker, Angela Barron McBride professor of psychiatric nursing Indiana University School of Nursing. We will discuss their articles, "Mentoring in Academic Nursing From the Perspectives of Faculty Mentors" and "Exploring Mentorship Relationships Among Novice Nurse Faculty: A Grounded Theory." These articles can be found in the January-February 2023 issue of Nursing Education Perspectives. Dr. Busby and Drauker, welcome. Thank you for having us. Yes great to be here. Well it's a pleasure to have you both and thank you for taking some time out of your day. Could you please describe the process of developing and creating the mentorship pathways to navigate academia and growing together mentor's perspectives on mentoring? One was aimed at the novice nurse experience and the other at experienced nurses providing the mentorship and what did you learn about mentoring that we didn't know previously? Sure, so to speak about our first study, we were really interested in learning more about the process of mentoring among nurse faculty in academia. Both studies were qualitative grounded theory with current full-time nurse faculty from all over the United States. The first theoretical framework with our novice faculty was titled, "Creating Mentorship Pathways to Navigate Academia." This framework depicted how new faculty obtained and maintained mentoring relationships during their transition into academia. This framework included five phases. The first phase, beginning work with a formal mentor, was where new faculty were typically assigned a mentor by a program administrator and the focus was on gaining knowledge regarding the faculty role. In the second phase, participants found that their mentoring needs were not being met by that kind of formal assigned mentor and so that was typically either through poor matching, a lack of structure or goals for the relationship, or mentors who were just too busy or maybe not interested in mentoring at the time. In phase three, participants, understanding the need for support, they identified informal mentors who were experienced and approachable. In this phase, new faculty began to acquire teaching skills needed for the faculty role such as test writing or classroom management in addition to receiving valuable feedback from informal mentors about their role. In phase four, new faculty started to develop connections with their mentor. This phase was heavily psychosocial developed with participants sharing that this was where they built friendships based on trust and respect with their mentors. The last phase is where the work of mentoring began through growth and career development into all aspects of the role: teaching, scholarship, and service. This usually occurred through collaboration on research projects, involvement in service, and committees, leadership positions and then advancing teaching skills. Grounded theory allows us to describe common stages in a process. In our first study, as Katie has discussed, we identified five stages that novice nurse faculty talked about as they described how their mentoring relationships
unfolded:
beginning work with a faculty member, not having mentoring needs met, etc. However, I think it's important to point out that not all persons in any sample experienced the exact same stages nor did they always experience them in the same order. So in addition to the stages Katie described, we identified a second trajectory. This trajectory occurred when proteges and assigned our initial mentors clicked and moved pretty quickly to doing the work of mentoring. They skipped the stages of not having their needs met or seeking informal mentors. With a larger sample we might have been able to discover a variety of other trajectories, so while grounded theory allows us to determine common shared process, it also lets us begin to understand variations in these processes and determine what some of the causes of these variations might be. So once we wrapped up the first study we understood that we only really studied one view of the mentoring relationship and that was from the protege or the mentee side. We then came together again and we wanted to focus on the other side of the relationship, which was our experienced nurse faculty mentors. That second grounded theory resulted in a theoretical framework titled, "Growing
Together:
Mentors' Perspectives on Mentoring." This included four phases and three strands that speak to the relationship with the protege. The interesting piece of this is those three strands. Some of the data told us about the work of the mentoring the emotional impact of mentoring and then the relationship with the protege. In phase one, the mentor and the protege were getting together to establish the mentoring relationship. Like our new faculty protege study, mentors were typically formally assigned to mentor by an administrator. The work of mentoring in this phase focused on the protege's immediate needs and was primarily teaching focused. The emotional impact of mentoring was feelings of uncertainty and frustration over the lack of guidance and resources for mentoring and as a result of that mentors leaned on their own intuition and experience to guide the mentoring relationship. In phase two, the mentoring relationship started to get going. The mentor and the protege began to build deeper connections and the mentor became invested in the protege's success. The work of mentoring shifted from teaching to more of a focus on scholarship and service in reviewing guidelines for promotion and tenure tenure. At this point mentors were overwhelmed due to heavy workloads, lack of support, and faculty shortages. In phase three, the mentor and the protege were going together and mentoring based on mutual trust and commitment to the relationship. The work in this phase focused heavily on navigating academic culture and relationships. Mentors began to feel satisfied, confidence, and joy from the mentoring relationship. In phase four titled, "Going Beyond," mentors began to celebrate the protege's independence and growth and cultivated the intimate personal relationship, typically a friendship that had developed, and then they also championed the protege's success as a faculty member. Lastly mentors also reported feeling gratification for their relationship but there was also a sense of loss from the protege leaving the mentoring nest, as one participant put it. Well thank you for sharing those. I found them just fascinating. I think they'd be a great tool for use in many areas of mentoring from TAs, GAs, someone on tenure track, non-tenure track, clinical faculty, I mean it's applicable in all areas. So what would you say you learned or what was most surprising that we didn't know about mentoring from the work that you both did? For me from both frameworks we learned what a dynamic, evolving process mentoring really is. This seems sort of obvious given the studies were grounded theory, which looks for processes and changes over time, but it really did hit home that if both members of the dyad weren't open to change not only in themselves but also in the relationship the mentoring could become stalled. For example, the second study revealed that the early work of mentoring, which we called "getting together," was meeting the immediate needs of the protege: teaching classes, developing syllabi, using technology, but at some point, as Katie mentioned, the dyads moved to another stage which we called "getting going" and they began to address the broader facets of the faculty role. How the novice nurse faculty might meet the tripod mission and what that meant for promotion and tenure. But that change involved some adjustments in the relationship that sometimes involved a renegotiation of goals between the dyad and if that renegotiation did not happen and the dyad were in different spaces, let's say the novice nurse faculty was growing concerned about career advancement whereas the mentor continued to focus on tasks that needed to be accomplished, there could be a rift in the process. There was really kind of two take-home points, one from each of the study. With our new faculty we found that mentoring is vitally important for the development of interpersonal bonds and the psychosocial development of our new faculty member. New faculty members successful mentoring includes friendship, trust, respect, and valuing each other's opinions. When we often think of mentoring, it's viewed solely in the context of career development, but our findings support the idea that psychosocial development and friendship is just as important as career development is. New faculty proteges also mention the importance of active learning opportunities and being hands-on with their mentors. Usually when we visualize mentoring we often think of one-on-one office meetings with a back and forth dialogue at a table, but our participants shared that those who were able to observe mentors in the classroom or in the clinical setting those who watch their mentors role model leadership in meetings and those who were able to collaborate actively on research projects together reported deeper connections with their mentors, deeper self-confidence, and then development into the faculty role. I was surprised in the first new faculty study how many participants relied on informal mentors as their primary mentors. I realized lots of informal mentoring happens every day in nursing academe but the pathway in the first model in which the assigned mentor did not work out and the novice faculty had to seek out other mentors who then became their primary mentors was revealing to me and is a phenomenon we need to know more about. Are there differences and outcomes in working with a formal versus an informal mentor? What if there are non- informal mentors who can take on a more formal mentoring role and what are the rewards and responsibilities of informal mentors? So that was something that I learned and would love to know more about. And then with our mentor study, one finding that was interesting was the data about the emotional impact of mentoring. So once again, we go back to this psychosocial component of mentoring. Good quality and positive mentoring relationships take a lot of time and effort and faculty mentors discuss the variety of emotions that came along with mentoring. Participants reported feelings such as frustration, uncertainty, being overwhelmed, and then later on, feelings of satisfaction, appreciation, gratification, and a sense of loss. So combine that emotional impact with heavy workloads and faculty shortages that are often present in academia and it can lead to a really big burden for our nurse faculty. Another thing is that mentoring is also not one size fits all. Every every new nurse faculty comes into academia with different clinical backgrounds and education the immediate needs for new faculty was orienting to the new world of academia and learning how to teach skills and research and service commitments usually came later. On the flip side, while our mentors were mid-career and senior nurse faculty with a lot of experience, many were new to mentoring so as a result they hadn't received any sort of formal training in mentoring and they mentored new faculty based on their own intuition, which can lead to different variations in the quality of mentoring that our new faculty to receive. We need to do a little bit better job at establishing what exactly the goals and expectations are for mentoring relationships. Thank you very much for that explanation. So taking all this into account, then how would you or what would you recommend to a college of nursing who is interested in starting a mentoring program? How would they use your frameworks? How would you recommend them starting with your frameworks? Sure. So both studies found that academic mentoring relationships often lack structure and best practices. Both our new faculty proteges and our experienced faculty members reported feeling unsupported and overwhelmed due to the lack of guidance and structure to many mentoring relationships. What you can do is things such as mentoring training programs, having formal oversight of a mentoring training program such as a director or faculty lead and then establishing formal mentoring agreements that address goals, responsibilities, roles and ground rules for the mentoring relationships can all help to provide structure. Almost all of the new faculty proteges and experienced faculty mentors did not also have any input into the mentoring match meaning who they were matched with at the very beginning of the relationship. As a result, mentoring dyads often did not feel well matched leading to relationships that were unsuccessful. Program administrators, leaders, and faculty should make every effort to allow mentors and proteges input into the mentoring matches. Both our new faculty proteges and experienced faculty mentors mentioned heavy workloads, which can limit quality mentoring activities. Another suggestion would be to provide service awards for mentoring stipends or protected buyout time for mentoring activities for both the mentor and the protege. That's a great suggestion, the buy-out time. I also think programs need to have more discussion about the differences between the role of mentors and other faculty roles especially department chairs or course leaders. Sometimes we assume faculty in these roles provide the same mentoring and I don't think they do. For example, a chair has responsibility for ensuring courses are taught, the needs of the department are met, whereas a faculty mentor can focus on the developmental needs of the protege and sometimes these roles can conflict. For example, a department chair might need a certain course taught whereas a faculty mentor might think the protege's time should be more devoted to research. I think a coordination and communication among these roles would be really helpful. I also wonder if for senior and mid-level faculty mentoring should be considered a fourth pillar in addition to research, service, and teaching. The participants often talked about how mentoring is not supported, acknowledged and wonder if that is because it is not a formal part of faculty roles and rewards. I think that program should consider team and group mentoring programs given that faculty shortage and heavy workloads, for example, could one nursing faculty be assigned a new faculty cohort and meet with them on a regular basis. This might be a more efficient use of time for faculty and would offer cohorts of new faculty an opportunity to gain peer support and guidance from one another. Thank you those are great suggestions to get us started. I want to thank you both so much for joining us today in this conversation. I appreciate the time you took out of your day to talk to myself and the viewers about this work and how we can begin to introduce this into our own institutions. And to our listeners, if you have not had the opportunity, please take a look at the author's work, "Mentoring in Academic Nursing From the Perspectives of Faculty Mentors" and "Exploring Mentoring Relationships Among Novice Nurse Faculty: A Grounded Theory." And I want to thank you both again so much for joining us. Thank you again.[Music]