As we noted in our previous post in this two-part analysis (Puckett and Felten 2024), student-faculty and student-student relationships contribute significantly to learning, motivation, identity development, well-being, and graduation rates in higher education (Felten and Lambert 2020). The positive effects…

In our 2020 institutional survey on mentoring, fourth-year students identified on-campus student employment as the fifth most common experience that prepared them to connect with potential mentors. Supervisors of student employees offer a dynamic example of meaningful relationships that can…

60-Second SoTL – Episode 56 This week’s episode focuses on a metacognitive intervention for first-year students on academic probation and features an open access article from Teaching & Learning Inquiry: Swanson, Holly J., and Bryan Dewsbury. 2024. “The Impact of a Metacognitive…

Recently I had the opportunity to think about mentoring in the context of a semester study abroad program with undergraduate research (UR) mentors working with DIS, Study Abroad in Scandinavia. Before talking with the mentors, I had asked their students…

Just like any other relationship, differences in opinions, values, and desires can lead to problems in mentoring as the relationship advances. Problems in mentoring might lead to superficial interactions, below-average engagement, unmet expectations, and difficulty relating to one another (Eby…

Student-faculty, student-staff, and student-student relationships contribute significantly to student learning, motivation, identity development, well-being, graduation rates, and post-graduation career and civic outcomes in higher education (Mayhew et al. 2016; Felten and Lambert 2020). The effects of student-faculty interactions are particularly…

Mutual trust is widely recognized as a significant component of effective mentoring relationships because emotional and psychological safety allows both mentors and mentees to use their energy for learning and productivity rather than self-protection. Unfortunately, limited research exists on building…

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…

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…

As scholarship on mentoring moved away from roles and actions towards processes and relationship development, definitions of mentoring have developed greater commonality not only around a shared focus on relationships, but also a shared focus on the general functions and…