Mentoring Program for New Faculty

Hamilton offers a College-wide mentoring program that aims to build a community of teacher-scholars. As part of that process, new faculty receive consistent advice about career advancement, both within the institution and beyond it. The program helps new faculty strategize ways to improve their teaching, pursue their scholarship, and find appropriate levels of service, and it assists in the development and integration of skills in self-assessment, self-management, and self-presentation. 

Each new faculty member is assigned to a small mentoring group with a number of new-faculty peers and one or two mentors from the continuing faculty. The group participates in a combination of structured workshops with all new faculty (see below) and more informal small-group meetings to facilitate real-time consultation and ongoing peer-to-peer mentoring.

All new tenure-track faculty are enrolled in the College’s mentoring program.  Faculty in visiting positions are given the option to participate.

Mentoring Program Curriculum

While the smaller group meetings are organized and initiated by the individual groups, all groups participate in the structured workshops, held twice a semester in the first year and once a semester in the second year. Below is the current curriculum for the structured workshops.

First Year

New Faculty Orientation

Introduction to Mentoring Networks and Peer Mentoring

Fall Semester

Workshop 1:  Setting Goals & Priorities

Workshop 2:  Framing your work for others, writing personal statements

Spring Semester

Workshop 3:  Self-Evaluation of Teaching (including how to use teaching evaluations effectively)

Workshop 4:  Faculty Governance

Second Year

Fall Semester

Workshop 1:  Strategies for Scholarship & Creative Work

Spring Semester

Workshop 2:  Networking Strategies for Internal and External Networks

Mentoring Resources

• Department Chairs play a key role in mentoring junior faculty.  One important way in which department chairs help junior faculty is through the annual review process.
• The Junior Faculty Caucus organizes informational events, writing groups, and social events for junior faculty.
• The ALANA Caucus provides opportunities for faculty to find community in diversity.
• Hamilton also subscribes to the National Council for Faculty Development and Diversity (NCFDD) through which several online mentoring resources and videos are available.