Photo of students sitting at desks positioned in a circle in a college classroom. A text overlay reads, "Instructor training is critical to improving outcomes with any FYE course, partially because it reorients faculty and assists in helping them approach their own classes with agency, autonomy, and ownership."

Improving Instructor Training to Reduce DFW Grades in First-Year Seminars

The first-year experience (FYE) encompasses various programmatic initiatives designed to introduce students to campus culture, assist with the transition from high school, and improve retention. At many colleges and universities, this is partially operationalized through the high-impact practice of first-year…

Image of Relationship-Rich Mentoring Map, illustrating the importance of supportive context and other meaningful relationships to foster mentoring relationships. Text overlay reads, "Mentoring Matters: Defining Mentoring Relationships."

Mapping Mentoring Relationships and Constellations

As we explored in a previous post, if we take mentoring relationships seriously, as recent mentoring scholarship compels us to, our orientation shifts. It calls on us to understand mentors and mentoring – those sets of meaningful relationships – within…

Three people sit at a table, talking while looking over documents by a computer. An overlay reads, "Elon University Center for Engaged Learning. Mentoring Matters. Defining Mentoring Relationships."

Taking (Mentoring) Relationships Seriously

As we have earlier explored, recent mentoring scholarship argues that our definitions of mentoring should move away from role-based orientations towards a relational-orientation that defines mentoring “in terms of the character and quality of the relationship and in terms of…