2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This “lessons learned” paper reports on the ongoing efforts of a small group of junior full-time teaching faculty to better establish a norm of reflective teaching and systematize the informal mentoring and support that junior faculty provide for each other.

While many colleges and departments host formal mentoring programs that pair junior faculty with more senior colleagues to support their development, there is also significant mentoring and support that junior faculty find amongst their peers. The presence of both of these support systems - a formal system with an experienced colleague and an informal system with near-peer colleagues - is itself beneficial. However, the informality of the latter often leads to near-peer mentoring activities falling to the wayside as schedules fill up with teaching, service, and research requirements. This issue is further compounded by the need for faculty to chase department or university metrics for promotion which can cloud or even overtake the actual practice of improving one’s teaching.

We set out to create a program that retained or increased the benefits of existing informal peer-mentoring in our group while adding just enough structure to ensure regular mentoring activities. This work takes place at a private R1 university located in the United States and the effort was initiated by an approximately $3000 “mutual mentoring” grant from the institution in January of 2024. The first three months of work focused on information gathering, reviewing existing literature on both reflective teaching and topics that were relevant to our current classroom experience (i.e. inclusive teaching, alternative assessment). That effort culminated in a draft set of reflective teaching prompts collected in a journal. The following semester, all members of the group responded to one selected journal prompt weekly and met outdoors or in an off-campus cafe for casual discussion. Upon completion of this semester of semi-formal peer mentoring, the journal prompts were finalized and distributed to the larger team as either a physical or digital journal or set of “conversation starter” playing cards. Through this effort we learned that adding a small amount of structure to informal peer mentoring can increase the extent to which it occurs within a group, and that the combination of a structured meeting schedule and informal or unstructured discussion was very successful. Anecdotally, even as the most active period of this work has concluded, participants in the group remain more likely to reach out to each other to discuss teaching-related queries and concerns than they otherwise would have been. The weekly coffee meetings have evolved into a department-wide bi-weekly drop-in lunch as faculty members not participating in the program saw the benefits of making time to reflect together in a low-stakes way. We hope that sharing this success will encourage other faculty to build similar peer-mentoring activities that encourage participation and prioritize authentic reflective interactions.
This paper will be presented as a poster.