Reflection
Take a few minutes to answer the following reflection questions for this module. If your time is limited, pick just a few. You can print this page to preserve your thoughts.
Become Culturally Aware and Responsive
- What aspects of yourself – your “social or cultural identities” – are most important to you? Do you feel you can share these aspects of yourself at work? Why or why not?
- What features of your mentoring approach or training environment might be difficult, and perhaps marginalizing, for a mentee whose salient identities differ from yours or from those of most co-workers?
Communicate Effectively
- What good communication skills do you already apply in your mentoring relationships?
- Which skills would you like to refine?
Use and Invite Self-Disclosure
- What stories (about your background, training, career path, etc.) might be useful to share with a mentee? For each story, consider the purpose: What is the dialogue you want to stimulate with a mentee?
Establish Trust
- Have you ever been in a mentoring (or other professional) relationship that suffered from a lack of trust? What effect did this have on you and on the quality of your work with that person?
- How do you build trust in your mentoring relationships?
Create and Respect Boundaries
- What kinds of boundaries do you think are important to consider in the context of research mentoring?
- How (and when) do you set boundaries in your mentoring relationships?
Align Expectations
- How do you communicate your expectations to mentees?
- How do you discover what expectations they have of you?
Provide Support, Challenge, and Vision
- On average, are you more likely to (a) issue challenges to your mentees or (b) offer support to your mentees?
- Does your approach differ depending on the mentee? How might your assumptions or biases influence your choice of approach with a particular mentee?
Employ Self-Awareness
- How do you plan to incorporate self-awareness and reflection about mentoring into your everyday practice?
