The faculty mentor support should be tailored to meet the specific needs of each fellow and the course they will be teaching. Faculty, fellows, and program leaders should collaborate to develop a teaching development plan that aligns with the fellow’s individual goals and the program’s teaching expectations. We recommend the following:
- Mentors should meet regularly with fellows during the fall, with enough frequency to fully prepare a novice instructor for their first independent teaching experience, and continue meeting regularly in the spring to provide guidance and support as they teach their course.
- Mentors should create a teaching development plan that helps fellows build a knowledge and skill base through a scaffolded process. This step-by-step approach to introducing new concepts and strategies for teaching within the fellows’ discipline will allow time and practice to internalize and use them more effectively throughout their careers. Plans should include some flexibility to address issues that arise organically as fellows teach their course. Teaching development plans serve only as internal guiding documents for the Fellow and the mentor, and are not submitted for review. CET has created a downloadable, editable Teaching Development Plan Template for Mentors that faculty may find useful as a framework or starting point.
- Fellows can log their experience and questions in a teaching journal to share with their mentor.
- Faculty mentors should observe their fellow teaching a class at least once during the spring semester. Feedback from these observations should be used for teaching development purposes only, and not for a performance evaluation. Mentors and fellows may wish to modify the criteria in CET’s teaching observation checklist to fit their own goals.