3.3 Mentoring doctoral students: the need for a pedagogy  (Page 8/10)

A helpful mentor is an excellent teacher. With an approachable Socratic style, my mentor encouraged me to realize the increased knowledge of both mentor and mentee. A mentor with knowledge of the learner can be timely with the quantity of feedback and assignments needed to make progress in the dissertation. (Patricia Gaudreau, Virginia Tech, June 2006)

Concluding thoughts

Of great concern is the reported evidence that approximately 50% of enrolled doctoral students in educational leadership programs will not complete their degrees, and that a large percentage of those who do will take an unusually long time-to-degree completion. Long time-to-degree completion amounts to a considerable waste of resources and an even more serious waste of time and energy on the part of the students and their faculty mentors and other supporters.

There is ample evidence that a significant factor in the low completion rates is whether or not the student has a committed and dedicated mentor. Graduating doctoral students overwhelmingly report their success due to the presence of a mentor during (and after) their program of study (Nettles&Millett, 2006; Stripling, 2004). These successful doctoral graduates define a mentor as someone the student seeks to emulate professionally and someone who facilitates personal, social, attitudinal, and academic adjustment to the doctoral program. In addition, they point to the mentoring relationship as continuing well beyond the degree completion, and including the preparation of career aspirations after graduation. A critical component of effective mentoring involves the mentor and doctoral student beginning their relationship earlier enough to create meaningful and substantive opportunities for the doctoral student to participate in conference presentations, journal writing, and other research activities. Too many universities delay the mentoring until the beginning of the dissertation process: much too late in our minds.

We insist that mentoring is difficult work and involves planning, practice, teaching, learning, and evaluation and thus should be viewed as a pedagogy in itself. But individual faculty usually do not acquire effective mentoring skills by themselves and rarely do universities and departments recognize or reward such behavior. The future is unclear but we are hopeful that doctoral students and graduates themselves will begin to demand a change.

We acknowledge the recent large sample of doctoral students surveyed by Nettles and Millett (2006) but point to an otherwise absence of comprehensive and reliable data related to doctoral students’relationships with faculty. As of Fall 2007, we are conducting a nationwide investigation of mentoring and advising strategies across a sample of 150 doctoral programs in educational leadership with using Park’s (2006) mentoring survey.

Some bright spots on the horizon

Two of us are currently serving on a task force at Virginia Tech with 17 other research institutions selected by the Carnegie Foundation to spend the next 5 years charged with redefining and restructuring the EdD in education. Specifically, there is an emphasis to share ideas and programs as the EdD becomes more of a professional practice degree centered on the needs of practicing school leaders in addressing the real world of school improvement, student learning, and improved teaching strategies.