ELNET facilitates mentorship for educational leadership faculty, including preparing your dossier for promotion and tenure, helping you prioritize and determine focus of EL activities, and simply making connections with other EL faculty at UBC! If you are interested in being mentored, please send an email to sally.willis-stewart@ubc.ca or robert.crawford@ubc.ca and we will find a wonderful mentor to match you with.

Why Mentoring?

Effective mentoring is a common characteristic of successful faculty careers. Mentoring provides a number of general benefits, including:

  • Enhancing the professional well-being of all faculty involved;
  • Supporting new and under-represented faculty;
  • Wider benefits to the institution, especially retention, positive working environment, and community building.

Why Mentoring for Educational Leadership Stream Faculty?

Mentoring provides additional general benefits for teaching stream faculty, who are a minority among full-time faculty at UBCV and UBCO. These benefits include:

  • Clarity on the missions and roles of teaching stream faculty;
  • Consultation on teaching and learning-related pedagogy;
  • Advice on professional development and career progress expectations;
  • Building community among teaching-dedicated faculty.

The ELNET Mentoring Philosophy

The ELNET (Educational Leadership Network Engagement Team) mentoring framework is based on the following principles:

Flexibility: mentoring partnerships can take a number of forms. No single mentoring model should be imposed on mentoring partnerships.

Specialization: no single person is expected to possess all the expertise or insights required in any mentor relationship. Therefore, mentoring partnerships should focus on specific areas of expertise and lived experience, rather than generalized or “one size fits all” knowledge.

Preferences: mentoring should accommodate the personal and professional wishes of the partners (mentors and mentees) involved with respect to subject matter and frequency and form of contact.

Reciprocity: all partners in a relationship should derive value from mentoring.

Ownership: Educational leadership and teaching faculty gain a sense of community and empowerment not as passive recipients of mentoring but by taking responsibility for their career development in partnership with others.

The ELNET Mentoring Advantage

The ELNET mentoring framework is intended to complement existing university and faculty mentoring efforts by facilitating the mentoring of Educational Leadership faculty on teaching, professional development, and progression through the ranks. Specifically, the ELNET mentoring framework can offer supplementary mentorship resources in the following areas:

  • The first years at UBC for new Educational Leadership stream faculty;
  • Promotion to Senior Instructor (materials and expectations);
  • Promotion to Professor of Teaching (materials and expectations);
  • Teaching dossier development;
  • Educational Leadership development (definition and expectations);
  • Interpersonal and professional relations (navigating contention and confusion about the rank);
  • Work/life balance and Instructor teaching responsibilities;
  • Promotion of teaching and learning pedagogy, technique, and curriculum development;
  • Scholarship of teaching and learning, grant applications, publication of research.

ELNET Mentoring Framework Guidelines

Please see here for these guidelines: ELNET Mentoring Framework Guidelines (PDF)