Facilitating Entering Mentoring

What is Entering Mentoring?

Entering Mentoring is an evidence-based, interactive mentor training curricula that engages mentors in collective problem solving and connects them with resources to optimize their mentoring practices. Mentors engage in learning communities through activities, assignments, case studies, and facilitated discussions to solve mentoring dilemmas and share successful mentorship strategies.

Additional information and free curricula downloads are available on our Entering Mentoring curricula and training page.

The books, Entering Mentoring and Mentor Training for Clinical and Translational Researchers, are available from Macmillan Learning.

What is the role of the facilitator?

Facilitating mentor training is not the same as teaching it. The role of a facilitator for our process-based Entering Mentoring curricula is to enable participants to take ownership of their own learning by helping them engage in self-reflection and shared discovery and learning.

The central aim is to build a community of learners working toward the common goal of becoming more effective in their mentoring relationships. Thus, the facilitator’s role in the group is to help others to work through their thoughts and ideas; it is not the facilitator’s role to be the expert on mentoring relationships.

Facilitators may walk a fine line between facilitator and participant. Group members will look to the facilitator for guidance and structure. The facilitator’s own experiences and ideas should enhance the discussion, but not dominate and become the focus of the discussion.

How do you facilitate Entering Mentoring?

Entering Mentoring is available for faculty, staff, or administrators who are committed to implementing research mentor training at their institution or organization for the mentors of undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty.

We encourage those interested in becoming a Trained Facilitator to attend the two-day Facilitator workshop: Learn to implement mentor training offered at colleges and universities, research institutes, and governmental organizations.

During this workshop, participants become familiar with the Entering Mentoring curricula, practice facilitating training components, and develop a plan for implementing the training at their institution or organization.

Some people choose to forgo formal facilitator training and instead download our free Entering Mentoring curricula. Our complete curricula include detailed facilitator instructions for leading activities and discussions as well as participant materials.

Evaluate your Entering Mentoring training

Facilitators may choose to evaluate mentor training that is based on curricula in the Entering Mentoring series. To support facilitators in evaluating their mentor training implementations, CIMER has developed a standardized evaluation survey that collects information on mentoring background, training satisfaction, changes in behavior, and mentoring skill gains and is designed to be administered post training. The evaluation survey may be downloaded as a PDF or Qualtrics QSF file.

Centralized evaluation through CIMER is currently available for the following groups with additional funding as indicated below:

  • Trained Facilitators who attended Facilitating Entering Mentoring for Researchers in National Laboratories in October 2021 and December 2022 (affiliated with the Inclusive Graduate Education Network and supported by the NSF INCLUDES Alliance grant NSF#1834540; contact Kim Spencer kcspencer2@wisc.edu to learn more)
  • Trained Facilitators affiliated with an NIH-funded Clinical & Translational Science Award (CTSA) (supported by the UW-Madison Institute for Clinical and Translational Research grant #1UL1TR002373; contact Kim Spencer kcspencer2@wisc.edu to learn more)

Additional evaluation resources, including expanded opportunities for centralized evaluation and research partnerships are being developed. More information will be shared once available.

Resources for Facilitators

The MyNRMN Group “Facilitators of Entering Mentoring (Mentor Training)” is an online community for faculty, staff, and administrators who are interested in or already using mentor training curricula in the Entering Mentoring series. Individuals are invited to join this group to learn more about the curricula, seek implementation advice, and share best practices.