Mentoring, As Applied to Preparation for Careers in Higher Education

The topic of mentoring has received a great deal of attention within the world of PK-12 education. In its best format, mentoring programs identify well-seasoned mentors who can provide encouragement and technical assistance to newer teachers or other educational professionals, meeting their protégés’ ongoing needs and, perhaps, indirectly improving student outcomes. In the meantime, mentors themselves benefit, through experiencing a sense of rejuvenation and/or profiting from stimulating exchanges of new ideas. Now, how about mentoring for educators who are pursuing careers in academia? It appears that substantially less consideration has been aimed toward mentoring for aspiring higher education faculty. In this post, I explain why this is concerning and suggest a couple of possible causes and remedies.

                  I am truly fortunate to have received terrific mentorship for the professoriate, especially since I made a move to an on-campus Ph.D. program here at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The mentorship has spanned a variety of areas, including active scholarship, writing, miscellaneous socialization experiences and—most recently—inestimable supports related to my pursuit of a university faculty position. However, I am keenly aware that my positive experience is most certainly not the norm for graduate and professional students. For instance, 96% of medical students expressed a belief that mentoring is indispensable for their personal and career development, but only 36% reported having been assigned a mentor (Aagaard & Hauer, 2003). Also, Johnson (2002) estimated that only between one half to two thirds of graduate students received faculty mentoring. These figures highlight a problem, first, because the professoriate is notoriously arduous. Those who aspire to it, therefore, should be prepared for the challenges they will soon face. In applied fields such as education, the long-term costs of inadequately prepared professors may be especially noteworthy. For instance, take my chosen field of educational leadership and policy, which is focused on the preparation of aspiring educational leaders. According to LaMagdeleine, Maxcy, Pounder, and Reed (2010), “the strength of leader preparation programs is, in large measure, dependent on the quantity and quality of faculty attracted to and retained in the professoriate” (p. 140). Thus, mentoring of future faculty ultimately has important implications for program quality.

                  Why isn’t strong mentoring for aspiring faculty standard practice, and what can be done to improve the situation? I believe a major source of the problem stems from faculty incentive and reward structures adopted by many universities, which emphasize certain activities (e.g., research, teaching, and service) over and above engagement in mentoring of students. Related, perhaps an individual and collective pause and gut check is needed: We should reconsider what higher education is all about and consider our places within it. Here in U.S. higher education institutions, Jacob (1997) describes mentoring as the “forgotten fourth leg in the academic stool” (p. 486). The classic European university system, by contrast, places mentoring squarely at the center of its tutorial approach (Scott, 1992). In the meantime, scholars should pursue the topic of mentoring in higher education with renewed conviction, describing the terrain and identifying effective, mutually beneficial models that fully prepare students for careers in academe.

                  Do you have stories to share about mentoring, from the perspective of the mentor, the protégé, or the detached observer? I’d love to hear from you.

by Joe Malin

Joel Malin is a Ph.D. student in Education Policy, Organization and Leadership. His research interests include: educational policy analysis; expert opinion and decision-making; school funding equity; and assessment. He is currently the Director ofPersonnel Services and Director of World Languages at Lake Forest School District 67.

The Forum on the Future of Public Education strives to bring the best empirical evidence to policymakers and the public. The Forum draws on a network of premier scholars to create, interpret, and disseminate credible information on key questions facing P-20 education.

References

Aagaard, E. M., & Hauer, K. E. (2003). A cross-sectional descriptive study of mentoring relationships formed by medical students. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 18, 298-302.

Jacob, H. S. (1997). Mentoring: The forgotten fourth leg of the academic stool. Journal of Laboratory Clinical Medicine, 129(5), 486.

Johnson, W. B. (2002). The intentional mentor: Strategies and guidelines for the practice of mentoring. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 33(1), 88–96. doi:10.1037//0735-7028.33.1.88

LaMagdeleine, D., Maxcy, B. D., Pounder, D. G, & Reed, C. J. (2009). The context of university-based educational leadership preparation. In M. D. Young, G. M. Crow, J. Murphy, & R. T. Ogawa (Eds.), Handbook of research on the education of school leaders (pp. 129-156). New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor and Francis.

Scott, M. E. (1992). Designing effective mentoring programs: Historical perspectives and current issues. Journal of Humanistic Education and Development, 30, 167-177.

Must We Standardize Creativity?

Some policy makers, education bureaucrats, and pundits use crisis-laden narratives that the public education system is in collapse and make calls for the overhaul of public education. They send a message about a lack of global competitiveness and impending economic slowdown and often use rankings from international tests as their example of a faltering education system. Their solutions coalesce around programs that seek to standardize, control, and homogenize public education via programs like the Common Core State Standards and national testing under the banners of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC).

There seem to be some underlying assumptions with the proposed solutions for perceived low levels of global competitiveness proffered by some policy makers, education bureaucrats, and pundits: 1) International test rankings are worth pursuing; and 2) standardized programs will increase the creativity of students in United States public schools. Colleagues and I have dealt with the first claim in multiple arenas. The second claim is more interesting to me because data exist that raise questions about that assumption.

Multiple down-stream indicators of overall creativity from students who were educated without curriculum standards and large amounts of imposed state testing exist that allow us to get a sense a of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship from a less standardized system of education from the accomplishments of adults ages 27 to 38. One indicator is the Global Creativity Index, produced by the Martin Prosperity Institute (2011). The United States ranked second behind Sweden, and ahead of countries like Finland, Denmark, Australia, Norway, Japan, Germany, and Singapore. China ranked 58th.

The United States ranked third on the overall Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index (Acs & Szerb, 2010), behind Denmark and Canada and ahead of countries like Japan, China, Singapore, and Finland. The United States ranked sixth on the index of Entrepreneurial Attitudes, behind countries such as New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and Sweden. The United States ranked ahead of Finland, Norway, Germany, Japan, and Singapore. The United States ranked first on the Entrepreneurial Aspirations Index and sixth in the world on turning those aspirations into reality once again ahead of Japan, Germany, Singapore, and Finland.

The Global Innovation Index ranked the United States fifth in the world behind Switzerland, Sweden, United Kingdom, and Netherlands (Dutta & Lanvin, 2013). China ranked 35th. Some other outcomes of creativity and innovation include utility patents. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (2012), the United States was granted 121,026 utility patents in 2012. The rest of the world combined for 132,129 utility patents, only 11,103 more than the United States alone.

The number of scientific papers published is a leading indicator of creativity, albeit scientific creativity, and innovation. And, contrary to the assumption that the U.S. is lagging in creativity due to a lack of standardization, U.S. scientists – ranking first in the world – published 3,049,662 scientific papers in 2011 (Thomson Reuters, 2011). Citations provide an indicator of the level of acceptance of scientific ideas and also of how well those ideas have been vetted and determined to be worth pursuing. Papers from U.S. scientists garnered 48,862,100 citations. For more click here.

by Christopher Tienken

Christopher Tienken, Ed.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education Leadership, Management, and Policy at Seton Hall University. Tienken's research interests include school reform issues such as Neo-liberal influences in education policy-making, the influence of curriculum design and development on student achievement, and the use of high-stakes standardized tests as decision-making tools to determine school quality and student learning.

The Forum on the Future of Public Education strives to bring the best empirical evidence to policymakers and the public. The Forum draws on a network of premier scholars to create, interpret, and disseminate credible information on key questions facing P-20 education.

If Wishes Were Horses: Why NCTQ isn’t Going Anywhere

Historically a comparative footnote in the history of educational reform, teacher education programs are becoming the focus of increased media, political, and public attention. One of the major forces driving the push for teacher preparation reform is the National Council on Teacher Quality, more commonly referred to as NCTQ. According to its website, the NCTQ “advocates for reforms in a broad range of teacher policies at the federal, state and local levels in order to increase the number of effective teachers.” Publicly, the organization is perhaps best known for its rankings of primary and secondary teacher preparation programs published in conjunction with U.S. News and World Report. These rankings have generated a great deal of controversy and criticism among a wide range of educators.  For example, among other issues, Ed Fuller criticized NCTQ’s input-based approach to standards, the lack of a solid research base in which to ground the standards, the standards’ narrow focus, the research methodology, the lack of data produced through NCTQ’ s research, and the poor response rates from its target population. Jack Hassard of Georgia State University went as far as to condemn NCTQ’s ratings as “junk science.” Despite the flaws in its approaches to research and reform, such is the distress that NCTQ has wrought among teacher educators that David Hill, the Division Director of Educator Preparation for the Georgia Professional Standards Commission, repeatedly tried to assure Education Preparation stakeholders at a meeting in September, 2014 that “NCTQ will go away” and that teacher education programs are more than capable of self-reform.

Despite the wishes of Dr. Hill and more than a few professional educators, the likelihood of NCTQ’s demise is remote. If anything, the current reform environment is more conducive to enabling NCTQ and similar organizations to survive, flourish, and reduce the ability of educator preparation programs to control their destinies. In the case of NCTQ, there are three factors that contribute to its continued good health now and in the foreseeable future.

First, perceptions aside, NCTQ has been around for quite some time and has more than sufficient resources to carry out its mission given that the organization originated through the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in 2000. Ironically, Ravitch – now a critic of NCTQ – was a member of the Foundation’s Board of Directors at the time and was a severe critic of teacher preparation programs and the overall quality of teacher prep. In the years following its creation, NCTQ received a $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education under Secretary Paige, garnered the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and possess a Board that has robust representation from the business and policy-making sectors, who no doubt provide financial and other support in addition to their counsel. As a result, NCTQ is logistically positioned for the “long haul,” able to carry out its agenda free from the financial constraints that hinder the organization’s opponents.

Second, in stark contrast to those involved in preparing teachers, NCTQ has been highly effective in communicating its message to politicians, policymakers, and the general public. NCTQ’s partnership with U.S. News and World Report to carry out and report teacher education rankings provides NCTQ with a monthly audience of over 20 million between the magazine’s print and online outlets, giving NCTQ a media platform that the organization’s critics and advocates for teacher preparation programs could not hope to match. The media platform also made the issue of teacher education more salient and easily accessible to politicians, national and state policymakers, and the general public by putting the issue of teacher preparation on the map; yet, beyond the control of those who actually work to educate future teachers. Were that not enough, the endorsements NCTQ has received from organizations and individuals including the Education Trust, Democrats for Education Reform, Rod Paige, Margaret Spellings, and various school superintendents and policymakers, generate a “secondary level” of publicity that gives NCTQ a level of credibility that belies the limitation of its mission and methods. Even with the best marketing and lobby efforts at their disposal, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to counter the media advantage that NCTQ holds over colleges of education and teacher preparation programs.

Finally, NCTQ will remain a part of the reform environment because it has succeeded in redefining the debate over quality teacher preparation and how teacher preparation providers assure that teachers have the necessary knowledge, skills, and dispositions to work in America’s schools. Increasingly, the debate is finding expression in policy initiatives targeted at raising the bar for teacher candidates and the programs that train them. For example, the newly formed Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, or CAEP, places a great emphasis in its accreditation standards on the validity and reliability of evidence presented by educator preparation programs for accreditation by its organization – an element espoused by NCTQ and missing from previous accreditation organizations such as NCATE and TEAC, from which CAEP evolved. CAEP also focuses on increased selectivity for teacher candidates as expressed through grade point averages and standardized test scores, despite the limitations involved with using these measures as primary criteria for determining teacher quality. These actions have drawn fulsome praise from NCTQ, as evidenced on its own blog. And, as more states adopt the CAEP standards, state-level policies regarding teacher preparation programs and how their quality is to be determined will reflect the new, ostensibly more rigorous, standards, thus satisfying another NCTQ objective. Whether such efforts are ultimately successful in improving teacher preparation remains to be seen. Yet, the very fact reform efforts are taking place at all – let alone in the public view – is at least partially due, rightly or wrongly, to the efforts of NCTQ and other like-minded groups.

Thus, to hope that NCTQ will, in the words of Dr. Hill, just “go away” conjures the old saying, “If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.” For not only will NCTQ remain on the scene, but given the current political climate regarding educator preparation reform, it and similar advocacy groups will only experience larger audiences and the political clout that comes from ever more bully pulpits. Perhaps rather than wishing NCTQ would just disappear, teacher preparation advocates would do well to learn to adopt the media and political methodologies that made NCTQ a force with which to be reckoned. Only when educator prep programs are able to best NCTQ at its own game can they entertain the notion of regaining a meaningful place at the educational reform table.

by Scott Grubbs

Scott T. Grubbs is the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (C.A.E.P.) Coordinator for the James and Dorothy Dewar College of Education and Human Services at Valdosta State University. Scott is a Ph.D. candidate in Educational Policy and Evaluation at the Florida State University and is a 2013 David L. Clarke National Graduate Student Research Seminar participant.

The Forum on the Future of Public Education strives to bring the best empirical evidence to policymakers and the public. The Forum draws on a network of premier scholars to create, interpret, and disseminate credible information on key questions facing P-20 education.

Book Reading: The Great Divergence (by Timothy Noah)

Breaking from the Status Quo of Reform

Dear colleagues and friends,

You are cordially invited to join the upcoming webinar/seminar on the Marketization and Privatization in Education seminar series in Vancouver. The next session, with Dr. Jim Horn, is on Breaking from the Status Quo of Reform.

Breaking from the Status Quo of Reform - 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm on Thursday, October 16, 2014 (Pacific Time).

Professor Jim Horn (Cambridge College, the US)

This presentation has a twofold aim:1) to briefly trace the role of testing in moving the accountability movement in the direction of breaking the “public school monopoly,” and 2) to discuss the role of testing in creating new educational revenue streams and spreading paternalistic corporate welfare charter schools, whose motivations and payoffs are political, financial, and ideological. I will highlight some of the key points made in The Mismeasure of Education (TMoE) and share some recent research related to the directions I see for educational profiteering.  Some basic strategies to challenge corporate reformists and pedagogical antiquarians will be shared.

Bio:

Jim Horn has taught twenty years in public schools and has served 14 years as a professor of Social Foundations.  He has published widely in peer-reviewed journals, books, newspapers, and on the web.  His first book, The Mismeasure of Education, was co-authored with S. D. Wilburn and published in 2013.  His second book on the total compliance charter school teaching model will be published in 2015.  He now resides in Cambridge, MA and is Professor of Educational Leadership at Cambridge College.  He blogs at Schools Matter, which he started in 2005.

For RSVP, assistance, or if you would like a video recording of the presentation, please send a message to Ee-Seul Yoon: eeseul@gmail.com.

If you are attending in person, please come to Scarfe 308A, University of British Columbia, Vancouver campus, from 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm on Thursday, October 16, 2014 (Pacific Time).

If you are joining the webinar, please go to http://bluejeans.com/ and click “Join meeting” as a participant and enter Meeting ID: 305154344 

We will start the event at the scheduled time, 12:30 pm on Thursday, October 16, 2014 (Pacific Time), so please plan to arrive or join ten minutes earlier.  Please feel free to forward this email to whoever might be interested.