My (Victoria’s) first full-time role after completing my Ph.D. In the history of the world, teaching and management are combined; Suddenly I had to supervise the curriculum, manage the teachers and teach several classes. I found myself wishing I had formal training in these areas—even though I had taught a few times during my Ph.D. Later, when I moved into roles supporting postdocs and graduate students, I felt a similar experience to mine, the idea. not well prepared to take on teaching roles and leadership responsibilities.
It wasn’t until I started mentoring others that I realized I had to use my experience as a consultant and teacher to navigate these new areas of expertise. Some of the experiences I drew from were examples of success, for example, when I coached a struggling undergraduate. Others represent failure, whether it’s the experience of feeling completely unsupported by a mentor or the time I avoided a difficult conversation that could have helped my mentor.
Similarly, when I (Jovana) entered my administrative role working with students, faculty and administrators, it required skills beyond those taught/discussed/modeled in my Ph.D. in the educational system. Or at least that’s what I thought at first. However, the more I worked on preparing myself for the demands of my job, the more I realized that I had already learned from my mentors how to direct, lead, collaborate and step back when necessary. Seeing the graduate school director advocate for me and other students taught me how to do the same for my students. The interactive style of my academic advisor working with my research committee showed me how to navigate conversations with different stakeholders. And finally, being asked by my boss to do so much taught me to step out of my comfort zone and have the necessary conversation about boundaries.
In your educational experience, you may or may not have had the opportunity to engage with resources in areas that may be important to your next career step, such as teaching, administration and leadership. However, you may have had mentors and have been a mentor to others, informally (anything from helping a classmate learn the skills to welcome new students into your program) or formally (as a teaching assistant, peer mentor or in other capacities).
In our roles of supporting graduate students and postdocs in their professional development, we see how these nations learn a lot from training, including:
- How can you express their values,
- How to align expectations with others whose priorities are different than theirs, too
- The importance of a sense of belonging to themselves and those they work with.
In our previous article, we shared advice on how to translate your teaching experience into skills like project management and problem solving, which can support you in a variety of potential fields inside and outside of academia. Here, we continue the same thread and offer strategies on how to identify and translate skills developed through training to pursue roles that emphasize teaching, management and/or leadership.
Communication
As a mentor or mentee, you may present your ideas and work to your mentor or serve as an audience for your mentor. Effective communication with different agencies is an important part of teaching, leading and managing. Ideally, drawing on your experience in communicating in mentoring relationships can help you demonstrate how you can engage those with different skill levels, varying amounts of experience and important priorities.
I (Victoria) have used my experience as a consultant to improve my communication style. I found that orientation meetings were more effective when I identified my goals in them and started writing an agenda and summary after the meetings—otherwise these meetings felt meaningless. I have adapted this insight into my management of employees (eg, by encouraging the manager to create our meeting agenda, sharing the work of writing next steps, etc.).
Another aspect of teaching communication is giving and receiving feedback. A good mentor ensures that the mentee receives regular feedback to help them reflect on their work and learning and, in turn, invites the mentor’s feedback on the support of the mentor and the work itself. Applying this to the way you treat others may simply mean reaching out to your new core to reveal how you can use a regular exchange of feedback to build trust.
As for teaching, you can model your advising approach by inviting feedback throughout or on key assessment points during the semester so you can make changes in real time rather than waiting until the end-of-semester assessment. Additionally, engaging teaching methods encourage giving students regular feedback on their learning. Your experience coaching others and giving them feedback on their performance can help you provide clear feedback about your students’ strengths and areas of growth.
If your next career move takes you outside of school, you can use these same principles with those you supervise. I (Jovana) make sure that I meet one-on-one with those I supervise and talk about work and their overall well-being, work and life balance. Because of the inevitable power dynamics, I also ask my supervisor to periodically check in with those I supervise to ask how they are doing, and how they feel about the job and working with me.
Promoting Independence, Livelihood and Sense of Human Being
An important part of the mentoring relationship is to promote the independence and self-efficacy of the mentee. Thinking about how you develop teachers to support them in taking on their own project can help you think about leading a lesson, group or unit. For example, you could explain how you would organize learning in your class, perhaps breaking the final project into assignments throughout the semester. As a manager or leader of a large project, you can think about how you can invite your colleagues to identify strategies and steps to complete aspects of the project effectively, independently and confidently.
In a mentoring relationship, the mentor also serves as an important resource for the mentee’s mindset; they are the main point of reference for the learner to understand their context and their role within it. The mentor works to understand the mentee’s expectations for their role and their professional and personal goals as part of helping them reach their next career step. The mentor can take what is being taught live and learned and give feedback on their goals, the achievement of those goals and what the mentor needs to do to progress in the right way. Whether you’ve experienced this as a counselor or a mentor, you can probably use your experience to develop ways to support someone who feels stuck to succeed. Likewise, you can translate this into how you can create a learning or professional environment where everyone can thrive.
The Power of Meditation
Reflecting on what we encourage throughout this essay includes reflecting on mediocre or poor mentoring relationships—as this, too, can help you reveal the kind of teacher and leader you want to be. For example, in the teaching position I was in (Jovana), I had a manager who controlled everything and everyone. Although it was a negative experience, I learned what kind of manager or mentor I didn’t want to be and what kind of manager or mentor I never wanted to have again.
On the other hand, my supervisor when I was a graduate assistant (and my subsequent supervisor until he retired in April of this year) and my Ph.D. both mentors were exemplary mentors. I learned from them what it means to motivate and inspire those you work with through your positive attitude, clearly defined values ​​and commitment to accountability.
In our two articles, we encourage you to reflect on those experiences as a graduate student and/or postdoc to consider how they can be used to envision yourself in your next role. In the often stressful, high-expectation and stressful times of academia, we don’t always take the time to deliberately integrate and communicate how much we are learning beyond the specific skills and content knowledge that is formally emphasized in our graduate studies and postdoctoral training.
But to be able to navigate higher education, your unit and your mentoring relationships well, develop the skills that make you an amazing future teacher, manager and leader. Here we have explored the ways in which supervisory experience can be gained or translated into these areas and can be used equally when applying and preparing to start that next role.
Source link
