Work with a community of peers and facilitators to develop and improve your research mentoring skills in this engaging seminar. Students will develop their personal mentoring philosophy, learn how to articulate that philosophy across a variety of disciplines, and refine strategies for dealing with mentoring challenges.

The content of each session in this seminar is designed to address the key concerns and challenges identified by experienced research mentors. In addition to the general content about research mentoring, all of the case studies and some of the discussion questions draw specific attention to issues related to multidisciplinary research mentoring.

This course is built on the evidenced-based Entering Mentoring curriculum course that is offered by the Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research (CIMER). For more information on CIMER, the research base of mentorship, or to request a CIMER training for your institution, visit https://cimerproject.org/.

Instructors

Sarah Larsen, University of Houston
Lauren Woods, University of Illinois, Chicago

Course Schedule

This intensive 5-week seminar meets online on Tuesdays from January 28 through February 25 at 11:30pm-1am Gulf / 3:30-5pm Atlantic / 2:30-4pm Eastern / 1:30-3pm Central / 12:30-2pm Mountain / 11:30am-1pm Pacific.

Workload

Instructors anticipate students will need to spend 1.5-2 hours per week on work outside of class sessions. Homework typically involves reading, reflection, and some writing.

Audience

This seminar is designed first and foremost for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in STEM/SBE disciplines, but generally relevant to anyone interested in learning how to support undergraduate mentees.

Registration and Enrollment

This short course has a cap of 20 students. Registration is open from Monday, January 13, until capacity is reached or until Friday, January 24, whichever comes first. Registration will be processed on a first-come, first-served basis and registrants from CIRTL member institutions or alumni of CIRTL member institutions will receive priority. Once registration closes, all registrants will be notified of their enrollment status.

Accessibility

If you have access needs, please let us know what they are. Contact Zoe Zuleger (zmzuleger@wisc.edu), who is supporting this course, to let us know how we can help you have a successful experience. In addition to meeting individualized needs, we will also take measures throughout the course to support accessibility for all our students:

• Using alt-text on images in reading materials
• Sending weekly reminders with upcoming assignments to all students
• Sending weekly reminders with missing assignments to students who have late work
• Sharing materials for synchronous sessions with students via Moodle (slides, breakout group activity instructions, etc.)
• Enabling live captioning in synchronous sessions
• Incorporating multiple modes of interaction into synchronous sessions
• Sharing recordings from synchronous sessions
• Allowing students to make up absences and submit work late with no penalty

Learning Outcomes

All CIRTL Network programming is designed to help participants achieve familiarity with our Core Ideas. This seminar is designed around the following learning outcomes.

Associate: Learning Community

• Describe and recognize the value of learning communities, and how they impact student learning.
• Describe several techniques and issues of establishing LCs comprising a diverse group of learners.
• Recognize the value of and participate in local professionally-focused learning communities associated with teaching and learning.

Associate: Learning-through-Diversity

• Describe the impact of diversity on student learning, in particular how diversity can enhance learning, and how inequities can negatively impact learning if not addressed.
• Describe how an instructor’s beliefs and biases can influence student learning.