Mentorship as Experiential Learning: Expanding Opportunity, Engagement, and Access

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome. Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Aaron Mall, senior vice president of partnerships here at PeopleGrove, and we're truly grateful you've chosen to spend a little bit of your time today with us, for today's conversation on mentorship as experiential learning. Before we begin, just a couple of quick housekeeping notes. Today's webinar will be recorded, and we'll be sharing that recording and additional resources with you via email with everyone who has registered. We'll also be saving time, for questions and answers at the end of the session. So as questions come up, please use, Zoom's q and a functionality, not the chat. So use the q and a functionality, and we'll make sure that doctor Finley has time to address them. As some of you know, this month is mentorship month, which makes today especially meaningful. At a time when institutions are being asked to demonstrate value, outcomes, and equity, mentorship is increasingly understood as not a nice to have, but really a core learning experience that expands opportunity, belonging, and career readiness. And that's why we're so thrilled to have, doctor Ashley Finley joining us today. She is a nationally recognized researcher and thought leader in higher education, particularly in the areas of high impact practices, equity minded learning design, and experiential education. So her work has shaped how institutions across the country think about engagement, learning, and preparation for an uncertain future. And today, she'll be sharing some research and insights that challenge us to rethink mentoring, not as something separate from learning, but really as a powerful opportunity structure that helps students connect experiences, relationships, and purpose. And so with that, it is my pleasure to welcome doctor Ashley Finley. Thank you, Erin. Hi, everyone. What a pleasure it is to be to be with you, to have this opportunity talk with you a little bit today in celebration of this month. I I'm beginning to think maybe we should have a a month for all of the high impact practices, which would be pretty cool. I'm I'm so appreciative of the the kinds of the conversation that we get to to have today. I I hope that we have the opportunity to talk a little bit, engage in your questions as, we get toward, the end of the end of the hour. But in thinking about the the framing of the the material that that I'd like to show you over the next forty minutes or so, it occurred to me that I hope it's a little bit learning. I hope you learned some new things. Absolutely. I hope it's some validation for what you're already doing, maybe for what you're all maybe ways that you're already thinking, certainly around the imperative, as Erin said, of what mentoring is. And I hope it's also a little bit provocation, a way to nudge our thinking further to consider where we might go next. And I believe that provocation starts with this slide. You might have already read it as I was talking through, but let me let me put a put an exclamation point on it. Our understanding of learning has expanded at a rate that has far outpaced our conceptions of teaching. I have the great honor of of teaching with Randy Bass at Georgetown University. And, so I'm a little bit biased, but I really love this quote. The whole article that this comes from is fantastic. If you are interested in some of the early writing on, high impact practices, this is the first sentence of an article where he, I think, lays out some really important provocations around what high impact practices mean. And even though this came out in twenty twelve, so, oh my gosh, we're almost to to fifteen years, I still find it really compelling to recognize the ways in which what this quote means to me is recognizing the ways in which we put structures around our mechanisms for change in higher education. In in that, we have conversations about what we know works best for students, what we know what works best for student success, and we often let the structures get in the way of how we actually execute those. And I laid this out as an early reminder of as we go through what I hope will be some compelling evidence, some compelling argument of why we ought to be centering mentoring as an experiential practice really in the vein of how we think about experiential learning, that you will ask yourselves, why don't we do that more? Why don't we take that next step? Why aren't we centering it in more clear and transparent ways for students and making it more fully accessible for students, and how might we do that? So I lift that up early on so we can certainly come come back to that. But, let me start with this. I mean, there's always, you know, the challenge of of being remote, but some early way to just get you thinking and it give an early chance to kinda get a a survey of of who's out there. As you reflect, how many mentors did you have in college? And I'm intentionally leaving that bag. I am intentionally not defining that for you. It is your own personal decision of who you consider to be a mentor, but upon reflection, how many mentors do you think you would you say you had in college? And I think people say, did undergrad grad frankly? I'm I'm open to the whole ball of wax. But let's just see what what pops up. And then we're gonna leave this in for a couple couple of moments. Liz, let me know whenever you're ready when you feel like it's slowing down and we've got fascinating. Yes. Very, very interesting. So the bulk of you would say well, the total oh, near the near totality of you would say that you've had it at up to four is our range, but almost the majority are saying one to two, and combined, we're at seventy one percent of you that would say zero to two. Thank you. Thank you. And I hope and here is what I hope. And I think even my own work in in mentoring and, high end high impact practices in general, but mentoring more specifically is led me to think a lot about the mentors that I had certainly as an undergraduate, but even in the graduate school, of how often I would say it's only in my later professional career that I've really encountered a much growing number of of mentors. So I hope that that is your own provocation as we keep thinking together here. So why is that important? Why why should we be having this conversation? Why, as you reflect on your own mentors and you think about the kind of mentoring that's happening at your institution, what what are the nudges for thinking about why we ought to be caring about this a little bit more? Here's here's just a a little piece of of collateral in the background. This was actually a a brand a piece of branding that came out of a brand redesign at Dominican University of California where I served as associate vice president and helped to build a integrate an integrative coaching program that I'll talk just a little bit more at the end. But, this is actually what our the media firm, the design firm walked away with after talking to them about what integrative coaching meant. And it was such an incredible piece of collateral. I I couldn't believe it. And it's because it made me immediately think of this quote and this work by Felton and Lambert, later, about the time that we were doing this. Students should create create webs of relationships that will stay in sustain them through and beyond college. We often talk about the necessity of having a constellation of mentors, constellation relationships more general, but certainly mentoring as a key part of what that constellation looks like. So what does it look like in our own personal network to be able to actually, in this way that you see behind here, see the mentors and the the the the advisers, the people that surround us in this equation. And just riffing a little bit off of off of that off of that sense, here's just a a snapshot of the kinds of effects that we know that, mentoring has, for example. So why do we again, why do we care so much about the idea of building a constellation? Because we know mentoring itself leads to so many things. And I am I have the great luxury of borrowing from, a forthcoming literature review that I did with several of my colleagues at Elon University. That's the Perkins et al that you see at the at the bottom that is forthcoming. But we know from doing this harvesting of a literature review focused on mentoring, the effects of a meaningful mentoring, but also meaningful mentoring for all students and thinking across, equity equation in mentoring, we know that it drives career outcomes, as Erin mentioned. We know that it drives increased sense of community and belonging. We know that it increases a sense of confidence in the ability to succeed. We know that it increases, students' own personal development and how they are able to reflect on where they've been, the entirety of the learning journey, and who, of course, they aspire to be. And we know that it's also got a direct impact on academic achievement and degree persistence. We know this exists for all students. We also know that we have particularly unique effects when it comes to serving underserved students that or students that have been historically underserved by higher education. But our challenge, of course, and I think a challenge reflected a little bit in the poll is countering that. Countering what we know are a magnitude of effects that are not dissimilar from other kinds of high impact or experiential learning, experiences that they reach a range of outcomes, but access becomes our dogged issue with experiences. So, for example, alumni who reported having a mentor were more likely to be engaged in their jobs and thriving, Gallup Finds in twenty fourteen, but only one in four at in a later poll strongly agreed that they'd even had a mentor. I'm gonna show you some additional issues around access in in a few moments, but this is one thing to keep in mind. And this happens again. We're we're talking a little bit about the commonalities between mentoring in on its own, but the mentoring is a high impact practice. And one of the things that really dogs us around high impact practices are is that access issue. I would say definition is another one, but certainly access issues. So, and there's even greater unevenness of access and and and and how those outcomes are achieved when we're talking about students from underserved backgrounds. Again, something we also know about experiential learning and high impact practices. It really extends to what we know about mentoring as well. So I wanted to just again, laying the landscape of how we think about the difference between advising and mentoring, and I'm going to hopefully be a little more provocative in what we how we define these two terms as I just mentioned. Part of part of what we have to think about when we talk about experiential learning is is how we're actually defining these practices. One thing that we tend to think about when we think about advising is that this is a series of these kinds of outcomes that we're that we're focused on in those mechanisms and processes. These are things around enrollment, persistence, academic engagement. This can often invite academic advising and success various various in various ways, often involving professional and career guidance. These are the things that we try to offer students often through the advising process to move them along, to help them this word's gonna come up in a little bit, to help them through transitions, keep them going on a path. Counter that with what we know about how we look at mentoring, what we tend to associate with mentoring around psychosocial support. Right? That these tend to be emotional supports, and and methods of of getting to know students through these means getting to know them deeply, having a sense of their belonging, their satisfaction with college, making them feel part of a community, and certainly also getting related to their confidence and self worth. We tend to have a dividing line here at these are two separate processes. But, again, I'm going to I'm gonna lift up a kind of consideration that as we think about mentoring as an experiential, form of engagement for students, that we're also thinking a little bit more about how we take advantage of advising resources to weave a little bit more of that mentoring in there to really maximize the kinds of resources, that we've got that happen around advising and are are, I would say, limited, but, are are less structured when it comes to to mentoring. So that's a little bit about why we care so much about mentoring. Right? And, hopefully, all of that, a little bit maybe a little bit learning, but hopefully validating. Right? So why you maybe came to this conversation, why you are passionate about this, why you are leading these efforts on your campus. But let me let me layer in something that I may maybe we've taken as an assumption, even entitling this webinar, which is that we would consider mentoring to be a high impact practice. And and I will say, I will just lay out there that I I know we use experiential learning as the framing for the webinar. There's a lot of of elements that can be experiential. I tend to focus on the high on the high impact aspects of those, just as a matter of language. Happy to roll with whatever language you have. But why do we care so much about experiential learning and as an extension, impact practices? Let me lay that out a little bit. Hopefully, again, this is reinforcing for some of the work that you're already doing. Then I'm then this last part, I'm gonna try to put the two together. So this is a universe of what we might consider to be high impact practices. Why do we call them high impact practices? For exactly the reasons that are in the middle. These tend to be persistent on campuses. They tend to have a tremendous amount of research behind them, evidence based practices that we know are effective across a range of outcomes, as we just saw around the mentoring work. We also know they tend to have cumulative effects. What I mean by that is that when you do any one or two, three, four, five of these things, they tend to actually increase student outcomes in a kind of cumulative additive effect. I will show you a research in a moment that, that we that we point to when we refer to to that, and we also know that they foster successful outcomes for all students. So while we know they are particularly helpful for students from underserved backgrounds, when we do these things for all students, all students benefit. So if it's good for everyone, then then it suggests that that's where we ought to be devoting resources. So one example of why we talk about the cumulative effects of high impact And, again, I I will admit this is my own research. I will admit that this is getting a little old now, but I'll show you some updated research. So this is just a foundational point to get you thinking about the cumulative effects of high impact practices. So this is from a national study that I conducted with Tia McNair back in twenty thirteen, had about twenty five thousand students because we looked across three state systems. We had a huge sample size for this that we that allowed us to do some things that at the time had not been done before. And so we were looking at these six high impact practices, and we were looking at them across these scales. All zero to one hundred scales are pretty easy for interpretation. We were looking at scales around deep learning, gains in general education, gains in intellectual and practical skills, and then gains in personal and social responsibility, sort of like civic skills, if you will. So, again, just just very brief. Happy to share these slides so you can look through, and you can, of course, access this report online. But here's what we found just as kind of a baseline. So students who had been engaged in service learning versus students who had not across all four of those scales had on average almost nine points higher self rating of how they had achieved on each of those scales. So you can look across every single one of these is significant. Study abroad's a little smaller, but still significant. So we knew just versus students who had and had not had these experiences, tremendously positive effects. But then this is what we really added to the conversation. We just started combining the hips in the high impact practices in the data. So we separated those who had whose students who self reported they had not engaged in any high impact practices, any of those six that I just listed when they'd had one to two, when they had three to four, and when they had five to six. And this is what happened. I I'm a quantitative researcher. I have been for my whole career. I have never had data look this beautiful, or this this simple. I can tell you our next step was to, disaggregate by a number of variables. It got a lot messier from here, but this made a at the time, the strongest case for the cumulative effects of what it means to really consider the range of high impact practices that are happening on our campuses and think about how many students had encountered. This will be significant when I come back to this final third of our conversation today around why what why it is so meaningful to consider mentoring in this equation. Now I told you I would show you some updated stuff, so I think this is equally compelling. So researchers, Valentine et al, did a follow-up report. This paper is also available online funded by Lumina Foundation. I remember talking to Derek Price at the time and his group when they were putting this together, and effectively said, we really wanna replicate it. We really wanna replicate what you did with different data, different states, and then see what we get. So this is the same group of six that you saw before. They did this super smart thing where they took that group of six, and they analyzed versus those that tend to happen on campus or effectively campus based and those that are effectively community based and did a comparison that way. And, again, they found just as high of gains across scales as we had found in the earlier research. Everything was significant, But when they looked at effect sizes of the magnitude of effect, they actually found slightly higher forms of significance around community based high impact practices. One, I want you to have updated data on this. I think it's really compelling for how we think about high impact practices on campus. I also would invite you to think about the ways that mentoring transcends campus and community based. When we talk about a constellation of mentors, we are almost always talking about mentors who are both on and off campus and how powerful that stands to be for our students when we really think about that as a constellation and when we think about it as as a as part of this network of practices. We also know, from employers that high that high impact practices, help students to stand out. I understand we're all coping with the effects of AI and machine machine sifting, if you will, through applications, but but we also have evidence from a compelling evidence from employers that these are the experiences that actually help students stand out in the pile in terms of them being much more likely or at least somewhat more likely to hire students with these kinds of practices. You can see there, again, how highly, for example, having a peer mentor or adviser is. I have starred a few places where we have consistently found that employers under the age of forty value things at higher rates than employers over fifty. What are those things? Those things tend to be community based, project based, and I would argue beyond that, relationship based. Again, something to keep in mind in how we talk about what is what is not just valuable in the workforce now, but what will continue to be value valuable for a new generation of employers who are valuing those commitments to community at higher at higher rates. Again, I know this is, again, the the learning phase, hopefully, some validation, but some evidence to back you in how you're really thinking about these, these practices. So here here anytime I talk about high impact practices, I always show this quote. This is actually from the same study that I showed you, the quantitative work work of back in twenty thirteen with with Tia McNair. We actually did a qualitative portion of that study where we talked to students. We ran this massive quantitative study, but then we talked to students in each of those three states across nine campuses. We ended up talking to about a hundred students. As you might imagine, so many incredible quotes and comments around how students talk about and articulate their learning. This is one that I remember when Tia and I heard it being a a little get gobsmacked by it in how clearly it it made a point around how we talk about high impact practices. The student in Wisconsin said, I have teachers that take us out of the building. I don't know what it's called. They take you out of the building, and you go learn about the community vegetable gardens. There are a lot of professors here that teach differently. It was a great reminder that students don't care about labels when it comes to what the type of learning is. They care about what happens inside of the experience. So this was the reminder for Tia and I. And as we put out the report to even though we knew there were all these effects happening around high impact practices, we knew that there was tremendous cumulative effect in what happened. It also reminded us that it was the qualities of those high impact practices that actually made a difference for students, not the name alone. So inviting students to take a service learning course, simply calling something mentoring does not mean it's high quality. So, luckily, we have guidance on how we think about quality. George Ku, who is well known for doing some of the early work around high impact practices, also had an early list, came out twenty thirteen with Ken O'Donnell around what we might call qualities or characteristics of high impact practices. That list remains. I love that list. I really appreciate Jesse Moore's list, list, if you will, typology, categorization. Jesse's at Elon University. She is reflected on that earlier work and and put together this group of things that we might consider as characteristics of you can see here engaged learning, kind of using that as a bundle between experiential, engaged, learning, and high impact practices. What I love about Jesse's list is it's a little tighter. There's six instead of eight characteristics, but Jesse does something really important, which is to include cultural wealth in the equation. So it is to suggest that any practice that is truly high impact that will truly be meaningful and effective for students draws upon that student's background, their sense of who they are, their the kinds of strengths that they bring with them from their cultural background. And I think when we consider the facets of what it means to have high quality mentoring or what we're really hoping for, which students get drawn out in mentoring, We are looking certainly at that one, certainly the ability to acknowledge and build on students' prior knowledge, but we're actually looking at all of these. So this is this is my my early provocation nudge to begin to think about how do we put these things together? How do we put the special qualities of mentoring alongside the special qualities of high impact practices? And one way that we can begin to see where that marriage can happen is around the commonality of of characteristics and and the qualities of these practices. So this is just one way to begin to think of that. Well, again, just for the sake of time, I won't talk through all of these, but happy to come back to them in the q and a. But I would invite them too as your own point of reflection as you're as you're thinking about the mentoring practices happening on campus. What is what is this what does this mean? So so as we move into this this final section let me do my my own time check doing alright. As we move into this final section, here's here's where I want to ask what we're not seeing, complicate it a little bit, and I hope this is the real kind of provocation for where do we move forward. So as you saw on I showed this this this wheel earlier, my my credit to Sabrina Perkins at Elon University for putting this together. Mentoring advising is not in this list, if you will. It is not in the circle. And that is because at AAC and U, we are holders of what you might call the the list on high impact practices, and we have not yet included mentoring and advising in that. I hope that will change with a book that is that is coming out that is squarely focusing on mentoring as a high impact practice. But I want to also say in full credit to scholars, practitioners who have long been thinking and writing about this, that going back over a decade, there has actually been some terrific work. Gloria Chris, Derek Hatch, others, Marine, Vander Maas Peeler, and Jesse Moore have really been talking about how we might envision the qualities of mentoring, and it it mentoring, it may be advising by extension, but certainly mentoring as every bit as powerful as a high impact practice. So credit that this is not a new question to be posing. It feels like, going back to Erin's earlier comments, it feels like this is the time to take it more seriously and take talk take take aim at what we're really thinking about on our campuses and use this as a moment to really dig into this question. So what makes mentoring unique, though? So if we are to consider it a high impact practice, consider it considering a part of our experiential learning portfolio, what would it mean to think of it in a unique way? That's not any different than other high impact practices. You might think of all of them as kind of serving a kind of unique quality and aspect in what they do. I'm gonna argue for an extra unique one when it comes to mentoring. So what makes it my might say, stand out a little bit in the constellation of high impact practices on our campus? Well, first is to take aim or to consider what's what's wrong with this graphic. It's a good graphic. Don't get me wrong. But the way that it actually plays out on campus doesn't usually look quite like this because and if you reflect on them, the way that we actually do high impact practices on campuses is that they tend to be singular, meaning students might encounter them exactly once. They tend to be siloed. They tend to be happening in distinct areas of campus. And by the very nature of those things, they tend to be disconnected. We almost never actually think of them or gather our data in ways in which we can think of them as a united whole, as a joined wheel, if you will. So when we think about the uniqueness of what mentoring does, I'm actually going to put it alongside a couple of other high impact practices. So this is an idea that I've been thinking about having worked with high impact practices for a very long time, and also having the opportunity to really think about high impact practices in their embeddedness on a campus, particularly when I was at Dominican University, is I saw something unique in the ePortfolio, the way in which community engagement is done, and advising and mentoring. And that is that those three and because we're focusing on advising and mentoring, I'm gonna lift up this one in particular, and I would say this is sort of the kind of one in this argument that really stands out to me. These three I would argue, these three high impact practices, and particularly advising and mentoring, actually serve as connectors of all the others. They help with meaning making. They help with skill connection. They help with purpose, and they can literally sit at the intersection of all other experiential learning to achieve exactly those things. I would argue enhancing the power of any one of those any one experiential, form of engagement a student might have and actually helping to connect it to other things. They are, in many ways, the aggregators and the catalyst to really drive meaning making, skill connection, and purpose for students. So this is this is, again, drawing from these forthcoming literature review that I did with my colleagues at Elon, and and huge credit to them. We have two student researchers on this, in addition to what we were doing ourselves, and just a tremendous group of scholars coming together for this. And one of the things that that is articulated, one of the stew things our students help to articulate as part of our research team was what it is that students need when they're encountering meaningful mentoring experiences, very much like high quality experiences. And I wanna and I'm posing these to think about when we talk about what meaning making really is in this scenario, this is where I think we go the next step with the kind of mentoring that we're doing on campus. And I'm going to make the argument too why it will be increasingly important to connect it with with the resources we have in advising to make it to help to deepen that process as well. So actor active mentors do the work. They show up for students. They put in the time. When students email them, they email back. They are there for that engagement. That seems relatively simple, but we know from students that they get ghosted, that they that that is that is an uneven experience. We know mentorship is goal driven when it becomes meaningful. It are it def helps students to define what their goals are, and it seeks to achieve those goals. So it's not a simple checklist of here's what's next, and here's what you need to do next. It is centered in how students are articulating their own goals for their own success. That student's identity is part of the conversation, that meaningful mentorship relationships really are rooted in who students are, what they bring to the equation, what drives them, what's their sense of purpose, what are the questions they have, what are the anxieties that they have. So it's centering who they are as part of that conversation. No two mentoring relationships should be the should be the same. And, also, that mentorships we talked about this notion of transition earlier. Mentorships are helping with those key transitions from first year to second year, second to third year. Maybe there's a study abroad experience. Maybe there's a return into an internship and certainly post graduation success. Thinking about the number of actual transition points. We tend to think of transitions for students as coming in and going out. But in actuality, there's a number of transitions that can happen when students are in in school and on that college journey in addition to coming in and going out. So really thinking about what it means to support students through that. Oh, okay. So a final plug for really thinking about what mentoring looks like in this in this constellation. If you noticed, if I put the two graphs next to each other, I've actually reduced the size of the star a little bit. Because what we know about mentoring and how it happens is that it doesn't happen for enough of our students. I think that was reflected early on in the poll that you all did. Whereas advising is the come to be expected kind of component of this. Almost every campus can guarantee, right, that their students are going to have an adviser at least when they first get there. We can't say as much about what the qualities of those relationships are. It has it has led me and a colleague of mine, Abby Crew, to really think about what does it mean to think about these as connected processes. Because in some ways, they're they're plagued by problems, but not quite the same problem. If you think about it, advising, I make a comment in a in a chapter that Abby and I wrote that, if there's one thing that can unify people on a campus, it's the universal lacking of advising and the quality of advising on that campus and maybe just a universal lack of real talk about what mentoring means on campuses. So in some ways, advising suffers from a a kind of superficial kind of component. Maybe maybe there's an advising checklist, but it tends to be rather uneven. And while it's while there are institutional structures in place, far less structure around quality, Mentoring has kind of the opposite problem. We have kind of a focus on when students find a mentor that can tend to be a good and helpful experience for them, but there's almost no structures around it whatsoever. Students are kind of left to their own devices to figure out who that person is. And I'm not sure if you've noted this, but this might be validating from what you've observed on your own campus or how you think about this, but they both suffer from kind of a universal lack of understanding from students that these people exist. These two things that we think are so powerful in helping students along their journey I was actually, frankly, a little stunned to come across these statistics. Less than two thirds of students were not aware that academic advising was available to them at their institution. So even if we think as institutional leaders in any any space that we're out on campus, if we know those advisors exist, take that next step to ask yourselves, do you think students know that person exists? And similar problem, dogs mentoring. Fifty five percent of students report not having a mentor because this this was powerful. The last phrasing on the in that report, because they did not know how to find one. So this is why I think we have an opportunity in really thinking about advising and mentoring together and how we think about the structures that we've built around advising, making those far more transparent for students, but also thinking about how we encapsulate some of the qualities of mentoring into that advising process. And so Abby and I talked about this notion of what would it mean to think about mentorvising as a way in which we are considering the how we guide students, how we help them along the path, how we take advantage of structures that already exist. And these are just a let me back up here. I wanna say this other little bit about this slide. And that those are also ways that we can begin to put the instrumental components that I showed you in an earlier slide, plus those psycho psychosocial components. And and the background here is really meant to suggest to enable students to tell their story, that as we build career relevant skills, as we think about how we're equipping students to have a sense of purpose, what does it mean to actually help students make that transparent enough that they can tell their own story? And we hope that that's a little bit what that kind of notion of of might do. I am in just, like, a few closing minutes going to share two examples of this. You can you can Google these. You can find additional information about any of the two programs that I'm about to show you, and I can also suggest others that are that during the q and a. But this is one. I I mentioned integrative coaching that happens at Dominican University of California. It's also a terrific video that goes along with this, again, in that spirit of helping students, a student facing video to help them understand why does this look different than just advising or just mentoring. Dominican, we found the sweet spot of calling it integrative coaching, of what that means for personal access success. So this what you're seeing here are screenshots, well, one from the video on the lower left side. And then this about me is actually a student's home screen from their elect their digital portfolio or electronic portfolio that actually holds some of those pieces together. But this is all developed through integrative coaching. Students' portfolios are developed through that process, and you can see, Jessica's tabs along the top of how she's putting and holding the the experience together. This is what I mean by mentoring Andy Portfolio being that connector. You also see community engagement in there as well. We also worked we were developing the Dominican experience that that houses integrative coaching. We talked a lot with colleagues at Agnes Scott College and because of their, summit program at Agnes Scott. And at Agnes Scott, there's a personal board of advisers that students identify that effectively becomes their constellation. And this mirrors very much who we think about as integrative coaches at Dominican University. But, again, just an example of one institution couple institutions, but you're seeing Agnes Scott here. One institution really thinking about what does it mean to make that consolation of mentors and advisers far more transparent for students. Nice thing that Agnes Scott does is, really equip students with the agency to identify who those who those people are. So I know we're gonna turn to q and a in just a moment. I hope I didn't talk too fast. I wanted to be mindful of time and leave plenty of time for us to to chat a bit together. But I'll just leave you with this quote. I mean, it never fails that if I need to end a presentation with a quote, Mark Twain has usually said it, But I really love this one, particularly as we talk about high impact practices and certainly around mentoring. The two most important days of your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why. I think this is what mentoring does for it. It helps students figure out what that second day is about. So with that, I will turn it back over to Aaron to to lead us into q and a. Thanks so much, doctor Finley. Really good. Enjoyed, listening to you share the research. And not just the research, but I also think the real human impact of mentoring, when it's done with that intention. And so thank you so much for for your time. There are some questions already, in the q and a box, so keep those coming. But I was gonna reflect a little bit myself. One of the themes that really stood out to me today is this idea that students don't just need access to experiences. They need structure relationships and really meaning making across those experiences. Right? And we're seeing that people grow institutions really wrestle with, what many call the value creation. How do we ensure that the learning leads to belonging, to purpose, and to post grad graduation, outcomes at scale? And and not just for some students, but for all students. And so what I think your research makes very clear is that mentorship and experiential learning work best when they're not siloed, and they're connected across the student journey, when they're embedded, really, between experiences and supported by really intentional design. And so you so much for for that. Got it. We have a lot of, we have a lot of our clients on this call who I think do a great job of of, facilitating these types of experiences on their campuses. And so a big shout out to our our community of clients and partners who who do this work every day. You know, at PeopleGrove, our research, and this research in many ways backs that how we think about, helping campuses through our engagement hub and our experience hub, which are connecting those mentorship and real world learning experiences and helping students translate those into experience those those excuse me. Translate those experiences into skills, confidence, and career direction. And so we'll be launching a quick poll here to understand how we, could be most helpful moving forward, whether that's sharing a best practice from peer institutions or offering a purse a personalized walk through of of the things that we that I'm talking about here. So without further ado, let's get to a couple questions. And we have some good ones in the chat already. Yes. We will share the PowerPoint for sure. That'll be, coming your way. So the first question comes from Katie. She says there is so much pressure to serve more and more, students with programming. How do we balance that mandatory metric for success with the increased effort and cost associated with these high impact, programs? Yeah. I I think what I hear in that question is a a really good one around scale. And we you know, it's just like we said, like, if it's good if it's good for everyone, shouldn't everyone have access to it? And I think, I think a couple of things. I think one is if we're talking about mentoring in particular, I would and I would say I would add that one of the things that was compelling to me when I went to Dominican University of California and as the founding dean of the Dominican experience, that Dominican experience is related to Katie's question. So the Dominican experience meant that this was by charge to make community engagement, digital portfolios, signature work that would come as a part of a capstone experience, and integrative coaching accessible to every student. All every student at Dominican would have all those things. And that was I I I will say, and I think my my colleagues there would not mind me saying, with a very small budget, actually. Less than twenty thousand dollars a year just for that budget. And here's how we did it. We took advantage of resources that were already existing. For example, be super specific about this. When we tried to scale integrative coaching and we wanted to make sure that all students would have a peer mentor as part of their experience, we did a harvesting of the existing peer mentor programs on campus in which there were numerous, totally disconnected, totally siloed, totally without quality control, and and not accessible to every student. Right? For the students in those programs, but not for every student. So we did a kind of mapping exercise, and we talked to the chairs, leaders of the programs to begin to put resources together. That's just one example of how I often when work with we work with a campus, we'll advocate for asset mapping as a starting point. Another quick example, we had to scale community engagement at at Dominican. All students were going to have a community engaged experience. I was told at the time, this is what we do at Dominican. I came in, right, brand new. I was told, this is what we do at Dominican. We're all about community engagement. And I'm thinking, well, we'll see about that. And so we did an asset mapping in every department to ask what is the level of scale you've already achieved in your department around any one of a number of forms of community engagement. And so part of it was thinking broadly about how we conceptualize what that meant. We were able to say within a year just of what existed on campus, we were almost at eighty percent of students having one. So I ended up being told the right thing, but it was totally disconnected and totally without an evidence base for saying that. So I'm a huge fan of the asset mapping to not what you what you might or may or may not have, and then and then resource aggregation around what is actually your vision for making something happen. But it's it's a great question. I I think that's really good insight. I might borrow that phrase asset mapping, because I think oftentimes, especially larger decentralized places, there are there is so much work going into these practices, but but there's little there's not always a communication between those different areas. And so it might be that you're better off as an institution than you even know already. And so I think that's a great a great practice to go through. I love this next question from Grace. Good. The question is, I'm curious about resources or recommendations for improving oneself as a mentor. Our program is steeped in these high impact programming and practices. So how do we so so we have that going for us, but how can I develop as a mentor? Yeah. Oh, god. I love that question. So I'm I'm I just got very excited because there's the we had talked about there's this assumption. Right? The faculty are great teachers. Mentors are good at mentoring. And in fact, the real part is that there's real opportunities for professional learning to happen here and to continue to be sensitive to what it is that students need, particularly in rapidly changing times, rapidly changing pressures on student success. So I'd absolutely point to NACADA, the the advising, and mentoring, like, professional association. I know NACADA has some resources. NACADA, is the acronym. And so there's that. We have also just done this work at Elon University around, this is part of where the literature review is coming from, and then there will be an edited volume on meaningful mentoring as a high impact practice. As part of that, for the last three years, we have been guiding a series of research, projects focused on mentoring. And the their international research projects, they are adding to what we know can be good mentoring. So I think part of what part of that help will come out in this literature review around and go and, Grace, go to the slide around what active mentors do. That that's just one very small encapsulation. We will have more in the literature review. But, for example, some of these research projects, we have one project in particular that was focused on mentoring moves, literally conversational moves that help mentors go to deeper levels of engagement with a student. So it's not assuming that mentors always come in with with the right set of questions to get, like, to get to the connection. Right? We just think there's gonna be this magical chemistry. And I really appreciate it. We had a the research team that kinda went after analyzing what are the ways in which those questions can be posed to get at deeper levels of engagement. So, those resources are out there. Those resources are coming, but aren't you're just really asking the right question around professional learning and not taking that for granted. We have a good question in here. I'm gonna label the category as mentor recruitment, but it centers around you maybe you have some folks and the question just jumped down, so I lost my place. But maybe you want some folks on campus to to to consider a more formal role. How do you, get talk to the supervisors of student employees and and help them almost see the vision, cast a vision for what that mentorship relationship could look like? Yeah. And it it so I'm I'm hearing maybe a question around peer mentoring in that question of, like, how do we maybe put some of those quality controls on peer mentoring? I I'm grateful that I get to do a shout out to my colleague Naomi Elbove at Dominican University of California who leads the integrative coaching program there. And Naomi when Naomi and I started working together, I she knows this. I will readily admit she she I was learning a lot. She brought a lot of expertise and experience, and we worked together to get things done. And one of the really, really important ideas that she brought was how do we make sure that students have the skills they need when they sign up for peer mentoring. That that peer mentoring means something different than working as a tutor in the in the writing lab or the writing center, for example, or in any kind of maybe other place. So we, we began a a peer mentoring course that students actually took. I don't know I don't know how what the culmination is right now of that course because what I would actually suggest is that students get something like certificate for completing that course, maybe a badge, something they could put on their LinkedIn page, certainly something they could put into their eportfolio or digital portfolio. But we actually built a structure around it. They any peer mentor that was actually in our integrative coaching program and served as a peer mentor had to complete the course. So they so we we really built a structure of quality around what we meant by that. And I frankly, I would say the same for faculty. I would say the same in in our integrative coaches. The people who became integrative coaches, on that campus also go through a training period as well. What feedback from faculty, students, or partners revealed adoption barriers that maybe weren't expected? That's the question from Kate. Loving this group. You're just I feel like we're just we're we're just doing this slow dissection of of my experience. I love talking about the challenges of this, actually, because it's it's humbling to talk about going back to the structures slide. Right? Our conception of learning is far outpaced or or understanding of learning is far outpaced our conceptions of teaching. It is always humbling to come in with loads of passion, loads of vision, and run into real obstacles that that that are about doing the work, that are about confronting the structures we have on our campus. And and often, they are they are obstacles that are created, I'll speak for myself, my own mistakes in how I've communicated. One of the early mistakes that I made because it was based on an assumption was that faculty would love the integrative coaching, that would love that kind of constellation of mentors idea. And this has been validated in talking with others who have experienced this. So if you are feeling some resistance from faculty on your campus as you talk about what it means to expand mentoring, there I think in one way, it it was about territory, was about these are my students. These are ours to mentor, and we're not super appreciative of the program that we were building around that. Again, I would hasten to add that was my own failure in how I was communicating about the program and really and really forefronting the good work that faculty were doing on a kind of mentoring. And so I think this is where some of that language around transitions can be really powerful of helping faculty to understand. They get students at a point in time, and they are helping them to advance through some some some next points in time. Largely, it's a transition out often, but there are many other transition points that are happening. And and what does it really mean to consider what it means to build this network around students? So so part of it was communicating, what that meant. I will also say for students, we always are like, students want support. Students will love it. It's also equally likely that students will feel like this is one more thing they have to do and has been forced upon them. That now they have to meet with their peer mentor, and now they have to meet with their integrative coach, and now they have to meet with our faculty adviser. So how so, again, I would come back to the clarity of communication. I'm a big fan of videos. I'm a big fan of the short one and a half minute video that lays out. You're not you're not making the student read something else of just walking a student through the process. Like, who's in this network? Why are they there? Why do we think this will matter to you? Those feel really powerful, but but I would say the the biggest challenge are often not assuming that people will love it, not assuming that it's meeting meeting a need that they recognize, and then really thinking through how how are you articulating the value proposition of this. I think the the next question almost builds off of that one, even though I think it was asked first technically in the chat. But I was just thinking about what you said that we can't assume that students are going to love it too. But also there's there's there's the evolution that takes place really from that first year through graduation. Right? Where what might be offered one day in one semester isn't maybe impactful or they're not thinking about that then, but it it is needed later on. So this question actually talks about, really, how do we move away from making mentoring transactional and lean in more to the servant, lead for the transition? How would you respond to that? Yeah. It this is this feels like a little bit it's another word I could've used in terms in in some ways, those instrumental supports, right, that we know that advising, for example, looks a lot like students come to us for a signature, come to us for a sign up, or come to us for the course audit. I actually really appreciate some of, my colleague Eddie Eddie Watson and Jose Bowen, his his coauthor on a book called Teaching with AI, and really some of the deep and wonderful thinking they're doing around how AI works in our world. And one of, loads of compelling, statements around that, loads of compelling parts of that argument, But one of which is what does it mean to use AI for some of some bad transactional stuff? Actually, leaving it to to the computer to do the course audit, figure out the the course prereqs, sift through that so that you're actually the transactional piece can actually be machine learned and machine operated and leave the human piece for what we wish we had more time for, particularly with the kinds of advising loads that we off we are often seeing now, which is something Nakata has this crazy statistics. It's something like a thousand to one in some of the larger institutions. Fully unattainable, fully unreachable. And we know students are getting lost in the shuffle, and I think we could, wager a guess on who's which students from which backgrounds are most likely to be left behind in in that equation. So how do we make certain parts of the advising process, the transactional bits, a little bit more efficient, leverage what we know from technology, and really then so we can focus on the human pieces of what that means. One final question. When building this is from Jocelyn. When building a mentorship program, where can we start in order to define goals, skills, and competencies for students from a broad range of majors and backgrounds? I would say, Jocelyn, the very first thing that comes to mind is ask them. I mean, I'm sure Nakata has some great resources. There's a number of of teaching and learning, kind of centers and places that are doing this work. Think Makata is really kind of, in many ways, the go to source, but nothing will ever match what's happening on your campus in your campus context. I think we too often underutilized student voice. So whether that is a survey on what they want for mentoring and what they are encountering some of their, life problems, what's their wish list, I would couple that with some focus groups at each at each part of where you think those transition points are happening. That'd be one way to structure it. Certainly, by class rear gear, please make sure your student population is actually fully represented as parts of those voices and use that as your starting point. That's that's what I would do. Great. Doctor. Pilley, thank you so much. What a great presentation. What a great conversation. And thank you to all those of you who attended. I don't doubt there are some amazing mentors on this on this webinar. And thankful for your investment in students in in those high impact practices, and we hope to see you soon on an upcoming webinar. Thank you.