Checking In

Hey Luke, Jamie, and Melissa,

First off, I would like to apologize. I had stuff written for an additional post and just never posted it. I've been swamped with classes, activties, and planning for my student teaching next fall. I have included what I said earlier below. I hope your training day went well, and it sounds like you guys have been very busy.

It sounds like your induction meeting went fine. I think you are right in saying that you sometimes have to be thrown into the deep end. We have training for our tutors but ultimately we are just thrown into it. We do have guidance which is the role you guys can fill.

I’m just going home for Easter so nothing too special. Things are going well for me, I’ve been swamped with school stuff the last month, but I will be done soon enough.

Northwest is same as always. We are experiencing Higher Education cuts, so that has been stressful as we see what cuts will be made. I hope everything is going well on your end and Luke, I hope the living arrangement with your girlfriend has worked out well!

It looks like I will be coming back to Birmingham in July, so I am very excited to see all of you again.

Best wishes,

Kirk

Post I should have posted earlier…

“Here is the second response to your posts. I hope everything is going well!!

Under BCU Employability Attributes – how to use and recognize (I’ll use the American spelling…mostly because my computer corrects me every time I type the British spelling.) transferable skills.
Jamie – I absolutely love this. I have to do a presentation on my visit in November to my fellow TDC staffers, and I wasn’t sure how I wanted to go about it. I think this exercise is exactly what I was looking for because I wanted the discussion to be about student employment and how to get more out of it along with my experiences! This is absolutely good or bloody brilliant (to use your lingo). I think that it should be used multiple times through training. If you have more information on this post, I would appreciate it, because I think it is definitely something we can use at NW.
Update: Jamie, I did use this in a presentation and it worked well. I might end up doing something similar with it for our Career Pathing program at Northwest.

Under HEI report:
It sounds like that was a fascinating read… I like the conclusions you drew from it and they make good sense. I like how you were planning on dedicating a person to manage the mentoring and the possible credit/recognition for mentors. Originally, when I came Birmingham, I was confused because I had a different definition of mentor and compared it more to our induction advisors, so to me having mentors as part of a retention strategy includes that induction mentoring and I think it is an important component.

Under Jam and Mel Statements
Awesome. I love see what motivates you and what you hope to gain from the experience.

Under Active Listening:
This is something that is difficult to do but is extremely important."

Update

Hi Kirk

sorry we have been so quiet at our end recently. We've been doing lots of work but perhaps haven't had so much to show for it until the last couple of days.

Just to let you know where we are at:

today we ran the first induction sessions for mentors: it was scary but went okay, the presentation could have been a bit smoother perhaps but that will come with practice and at the end we had a good discussion with the student mentors who had some good advice for what they would like to have seen more of etc. Sometimes you just have to throw yourself in at the deep end and you get good stuff out of it at the other end and we certainly learnt a lot from giving this induction today. I'm about to revise some of the slides but I'll attach them to you in an email later today or at the beginning of next week.

We have also produced a handbook for academic mentors to refer to which includes details on dos and don'ts, how to plan, contacts etc. Again I'll send over a pdf. version of this for you to peruse at your leisure.

We are currently setting up a blog which should go live next week which each and every mentor will be an author of, we will be asking them to put up their plans, evaluation of sessions etc. each week. I'll put the link up here now but don't expect to see anything yet, I'll re-link you the address when stuff starts happening on there. This is going to be our way of evaluating the work the students are doing and also to create a resource of experiences that demonstrate good practice and perhaps issues to try and avoid.

http://acadmentors.wordpress.com/

This is a quick diagram of the various stages that we need to do over the coming weeks

Hope you are okay, how is uni going, have you got any plans for Easter?

Luke

Questions for first mentor meeting

Questions  

1.       What faculty is your project based inside?

2.       What are the goals or aims of your project?

3.       Do you have any ideas on what skills you want to gain from this project?

4.       Have you any concerns about the scheme?

5.       Are there any aspects which you would like to improve on the scheme?

6.       Have you found any benefits from the project to your university life?

7.       Have you any trouble accessing or using the blog?

8.       Have you had any difficulties with the work load the scheme requires?

      The Purpose of this mid evaluation process is a check up to re-assert all of the things we mentioned in the training session but didn't really go over in detail. Such as details of how to use the blog and how to poast, update profile information and so what. If we constantly evaluate the project we can see what areas need improving and which ones are successful in carrying out and well ran academic mentoring scheme. We can also get the mentors talking and make them establish a relationship together, providing a unity which should be a vital source of confidence while carrying out their work and mentoring sessions.