Graduate Student Professional Development

Mutual Mentoring Groups

In support of the new KSU R2 Roadmap Community pillar, we expanded our mutual mentoring group (MMG) options to meet faculty demand. We offered our first MMG at the request of department chairs in 2018, added a group at the request of assistant and associate deans in 2020, and then increased the number of groups offered to ten in 20212022, based on numerous requests we received from faculty expressing specific mutual mentoring needs.

The expansion of this program is based on research that finds MMGs provide an opportunity for faculty to build community and support each other while achieving goals within a particular area of focus. This literature also finds that mutual mentoring is an important part of faculty inclusion, retention, progression, and well-being.

In our MMG program, each group has a lead faculty mentor who is an expert in the group’s theme based on their previous roles at KSU and/or their research expertise. Members participate in monthly or bimonthly meetings based on their preference. They have access to CETL resources, shared Teams content, including literature shared within the community as well as some selected by KSU subject-matter experts, along with coconstructed reflection and discussion prompts. Participants in the groups highlighted how beneficial the MMGs have been in supporting their scholarly and professional goals as well as increasing their well-being and sense of community.

Scholarship and Productivity

With the Rsearch with Relevance initiative, KSU has set ambitious goals for itself with the R2 roadmap, particularly in the area of scholarship and creative activity. CETL is proud to have continued supporting faculty scholarship productivity this year. We provided support in several ways, including offering workshops, webinars, and communities of practice.

WEBINARS AND WORKSHOPS

The focus of our workshop series in this area is increasing scholarship productivity, as distinct from the support that the Office of Research (OR) provides for securing and implementing funded research. Our workshop topics are, however, selected in partnership with the Office of Research based in part on the barriers to scholarship productivity reported to their office.

Workshop Title

Writing Compelling Internal Award and Funding Narratives

Meaningful Intersections: Balancing Teaching, Scholarship, and Service for Success in Promotion and Tenure

Resilience, Responding to Rejection and Reviewer Feedback

Scholarship Productivity: Identifying Challenges and Overcoming Barriers

Giving and Receiving Feedback, A Workshop for the Office of Research Summer Research Fellows Letizia Guglielmo, CETL Faculty Fellow & Professor of English & Interdisciplinary Studies

Letizia Guglielmo, CETL Faculty Fellow & Professor of English & Interdisciplinary Studies

Letizia Guglielmo, CETL Faculty Fellow & Professor of English & Interdisciplinary Studies

Este Jordan, CETL Director for Faculty Success and Professor of Political Science

Este Jordan, CETL Director for Faculty Success and Professor of Political Science

Facilitators

Also in support of the roadmap’s research pillar, CETL-Faculty Success offered, for the second year, two writing-focused communities of practice to foster progress on individual writing projects: Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks and Write Here, Write Now.

Write Here, Write Now

CETL continued to offer this program to build community for faculty around regular writing accountability meetings. These weekly drop-in sessions were designed as a synchronous virtual writing space that used the Pomodoro Technique of chunking the time and rewarding work with breaks. To that end, participants were asked in each session to articulate their goals for the writing time and celebrate accomplishments at the end of the session. All participants made progress or completed a scholarly project by the end of the semester in which they participated.

Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks

This program, modeled after a best-selling book and replicated nationally, is structured as a joint semester-long book club and writing accountability group supporting faculty in writing a journal article for submission. All participants completed an article for submission by the end of the semester in which they participated.