Professional Development and Mentoring for Under-Represented Minority Faculty

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Professional development and mentoring for under-represented minority faculty

Valerie Williams, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma
Sonia Crandall, Bowman Gray School of Medicine, North Carolina

Introduction

Academic institutions in the US are continuously challenged to recruit and retain under-represented minority faculty (UMF). Recruiting UMF to and retaining them in the science and health professions poses an ever keener challenge. Although the numbers of ethnic minority faculty members in the academic community continue to grow, their representation at higher ranks, in tenure-track and tenured positions lags behind that of their non-minority colleagues[1]. The growth rate among UMF in tenure track positions is less than half the rate for non-tenure track positions [2]. Among academics, status and prestige are attributed to tenure track faculty; there is a corollary lack of prestige and stability associated with non-tenure track positions. Full-time UMF are much less likely to hold tenure[3].

Two other problems influence the academic career development of UMF: lack of supportive climates in their academic environments (including absence of mentoring and subtle discrimination) and the expectation that minority faculty will assume mentoring responsibilities for students of colour, in addition to fulfilling academic responsibilities. UMF may have less opportunity to engage in mentoring relationships because there are fewer tenured colleagues from similar ethnic backgrounds available on predominantly white campuses, their colleagues may have the perceptions that affirmative action implies that UMF are less qualified than non-minority faculty[4], and approaches to mentoring may not fit the resources, environment, needs, or constraints of either mentor or protégé[5]. Yet, mentoring and coaching for UMF, and all junior faculty, is a critical component of academic success[6]. This is particularly true in an environment such as academia, which has its own culture, expectations and tangible indicators of successful performance.

Of all newly hired faculty, 40-50% do not advance successfully[7]. If UMF are experiencing similar or lower advancement success, we have reason to be alarmed about the lack of diversity and equality within the academic community and its future impact. Additionally, faculty are being called on to perform a variety of tasks which require them to use skills beyond those of their discipline specific training. Some of these tasks include facilitating small groups of learners in problem-based learning (PBL) curricula, building collaborative teams and providing leadership in a variety of venues.

How do these realities relate to broader theoretical and disciplinary perspectives and to the field of adult education? Faculty are adult learners and faculty developers are adult educators, many of whom are formally trained in adult education. The field of adult education is eclectic, and there is a need for greater cross communication between adult education generalists and adult educators who specialise in continuing professional education. Our purposes for this paper are to facilitate cross communication, broaden the adult education dialogue to include diverse voices and share information about an innovative faculty professional development and mentoring (FPDM) programme for UMF as a professional development response to changing professional environments focusing on faculty who might otherwise be marginalised. We will discuss strategies for nurturing FPDM in academic institutions. Because our reality is constructed from the practices of science and health professions education, we created our case around faculty within those disciplines. Although that is our framework, we believe we are sharing perspectives and perceptions that are transferable across the professional environments of academic institutions.

Adult education perspectives

Except for nursing education, adult education practices in health professional and science-based education at the university level have appeared to be more the exception than the rule in the United States. Adult education philosophy has been absent from the curriculum design process primarily because those who have been responsible for curriculum design and revision usually have not been individuals trained in adult education principles. Science and health professions curricula traditionally have been rigidly structured, content focused and faculty driven and dominated. Curricular reform has been a slow process[8], because academic departments have feared losing ‘their time’ in the curriculum to convey discipline specific content knowledge. One of the most fervently debated issues in medical education curricular reform has been, and continues to be, altering the curricular time of an academic department. The attitude has been, ‘Don’t fix what isn’t broken. Students need the content.’

Most faculty in the sciences and in health professions’ schools are the products of traditional curriculum. Few have experienced an educational process that respected them as adult learners. Thus, they typically teach as they were taught and pattern themselves according to the role models they encountered. Fortunately, we have been experiencing a shift in the thinking of what is good educational practice in the sciences and health professions mainly because these disciplines have becoming increasingly influenced by the discipline of education. Faculty who are professionally trained as educators, many as adult educators, are becoming more visible in curricular reform decisions and are helping to change the focus away from content to one that is more process oriented and learner-centred. Science and health professions faculty are acknowledging that their learners are adults who are responsible for their own learning and that lectures are not the only strategy for efficient transfer of content.

Because of the information explosion and rate of change of scientific knowledge (the half-life of the body of knowledge and practice within most health professions and science-based disciplines is about five years), most faculty understand they cannot ‘tell’ learners everything they need to know to be competent practitioners during the period of time devoted to professional training. They have come to realise that foremost among their many purposes is to cultivate lifelong learners who have astute problem-solving acumen and the ability to continuously self-assess and self-direct their learning. Their raisons d’être, in addition to teaching content knowledge and practical skills and socialising neophytes into the professions, are to promote critical thinking and reflection, develop problem-solving skills and encourage self-direction in learning. That is, to create the consummate professional means to create the consummate learner. Therefore, the curriculum must be flexible enough to give learners opportunities to build and hone these type of skills during professional training if they are expected to function as autonomous practitioners after training.

One response to the challenge of making curriculum more flexible and adult learner-centred has been PBL. PBL is a group-oriented, group and self-directed learning process structured around a patient ‘case’ that is guided by faculty tutors who may not be content experts relevant to the case. Although PBL in medical education has been around for nearly 30 years, it is a newer educational strategy to come into play in the past 10-15 years in US medical education. PBL has become more popular in the 1990s with an increasing number of schools considering adopting it in various forms. About 30% of the medical schools in the US have initiated some form of PBL or other self-directed learning activities in the curriculum[9]. As PBL is being slowly adopted in medicine, it is being adopted more quickly by other disciplines (that is dentistry, engineering, environmental health, nursing, occupational therapy, optometry, pharmacy, physical therapy, veterinary medicine). PBL has proven to be an effective method to use in science based education[10], and as a result has recently filtered into elementary and secondary science education programs [11].

Although the aim of the paper is not to delve into the strengths or weaknesses of PBL or its rate of adoption, we present it as one example of the new tasks requiring skills beyond discipline specific training that faculty in science and health professions education may be asked to acquire. Those skills include facilitating small group process, attending to group dynamics, assisting students to identify learning issues, evaluating students’ problem solving skills qualitatively and helping students to hone self-assessment and peer assessment skills.

FPDM programme

Most colleges sponsor formal or informal faculty development activities. Data collected at University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center (OUHSC) indicated that these programs are often discipline specific and are intended to supplement and complement assumed foundational skills in the clinical, education or research portfolio of the faculty member.

The FPDM program is not designed to supplant faculty development activities provided at participants’ home institutions, nor is it designed to be a remediation programme. It is designed to complement existing faculty development activities and enhance the capacity of UMF to have effective professional relationships by encouraging them to engage in collegial dialogue centred on goal setting and counsel seeking, to develop interdisciplinary relationships as part of their professional and intellectual network, and to invest in team building and leadership skills that can enhance their personal comfort with seeking out and engaging in mentor-protégé relationships at their home institutions.

The FPDM program is a national offering within the existing OUHSC faculty leadership programme which began October, 1989. The programme faculty were guided by adult learning philosophy when designing the FPDM programme. The key objective of the programme is to involve UMF in an eight-day structured, interdisciplinary and experiential programme that focuses on topics of education and instruction, scholarship and research and professional academic skills (communication and negotiation, administration, leadership and team building). Each topic provides participants with a set of foundational skills and assessment tools and methods to check their individual development.

The program is designed to assist participants to frame an individual faculty development plan (IFDP). The IFDP is patterned after the adult learning contract and includes goals, objectives, strategies for accomplishing objectives, evaluation criteria and time lines for accomplishments. The purpose of the IFDP is to diminish the degree of mystery often associated with faculty performance, evaluation and advancement. It is a tool for conducting a structured dialogue with the department leader about goals, expectations and specific outcomes - or outcome examples - desired by the faculty member and the department head. The IFDP can provide specific markers to identify areas for continuing self-assessment, professional growth and development and to note accomplishments at regular intervals.

Planning of career goals is an ongoing process, and should ideally take place within the context of a mentor relationship. The FPDM program assists participants in the development and implementation of personal strategies to engage in mentor-protégé relationships within their home college and through interprofessional relationships. The mentoring component of the FPDM programme provides participants with follow-up during the academic year post attendance. The follow-up includes dialogue with faculty mentors (from the FPDM programme) to discuss progress on the IFDP goals and objectives and follow-up with the participants’ ‘natural mentors’ (department head or senior faculty member) to encourage initiation, maintenance or modification of the consultative process based on the participants’ key performance objectives.

UMF are recruited from historically Black colleges and universities and US colleges of arts and sciences (medicine, allied health, dentistry, pharmacy, nursing, and public health). These fields are those for which the OUHSC have current and specific educational and scholarly expertise. Application materials are provided to college deans and university representatives at institutions of higher education.

Nurturing FPDM in academic institutions

The PEW Foundation for the health professions[12] recently reported on the changes expected to impact health professional education. The health professional training setting is a particularly demanding environment for all faculty, particularly as health care reforms in the US move the health care setting toward more managed care and more accountability. Creative approaches to clinical teaching in these environments will clearly demand more attention. Evans[13] notes that as academic institutions are increasingly pushed by external standards, the former ‘gold standard’ that rewarded faculty with advancement for their independent and single minded drive for productivity directed toward a tenure outcome, is no longer suitable. In this emerging environment junior UMF face extraordinary challenges along with their non-minority peers. Although in slow transition, general expectations for faculty advancement continue to include measures of success relevant to crafting a significant expertise and role in the teaching program, contributing to the development of new knowledge through research and scholarship, providing professional service in the discipline as a clinician or peer reviewer in the scientific area and mentoring the acquisition of discipline specific skills by students. Faculty are also expected to maintain their own proficiency through continued professional development, and to contribute to the university community at large through service on committees or in other delegated roles (such as administration).

As the environment for health professional education grows increasingly complex, through requirements from internal and external accrediting bodies, UMF face a paradox. Success in the traditional sense might require them to be self-focused and exceptionally task-oriented. This would reduce their availability to students outside of structured and formal contact, and would similarly diminish their availability for service activities. Without these role models, students have few avenues to see UMF as key participants in the educational domain, and the higher education environment loses the perspectives of these individuals in crafting initiatives that could make the environment more productive for UMF and their junior peers. The need for mentoring in these times is increasingly important in our view. Faculty caught in the transitional period will undoubtably hear mixed messages regarding the importance of where and how they use their time. Waxman[14] suggests that we develop ‘effective methods for mentoring junior faculty...and make available the most appropriate role models from the perspective of gender and minority status’. A structured faculty professional development and mentoring program can use the expertise of adult educators to engage UMF in functional learning that is generative in nature, encouraging the faculty member to gain skills suited to an evolving higher education environment.

Institutions of higher education need faculty who have both fluency and flexibility. Fluency contributes directly to the faculty member’s ability to meet the learner and engage in the learning process, without rigid adherence to a pro forma structure but with attention to student mastery of the information and continued investment in learning. Flexibility contributes to the capacity of an institution to call upon a cadre of individuals who have the requisite skills to be effective team members or leaders. The FPDM program provides junior faculty with an opportunity to build and hone their skills in communication to professional and lay audience members, articulate a personal research agenda and examine the skills needed to investigate both quantitatively and qualitatively based questions. Additionally, FPDM provides an avenue for junior faculty to acquire a clear understanding of the formal and informal organisational and leadership issues that confront the academic health professional and scientific community. These issues, including examining how universities will respond to the PEW report and the impact of those responses on the educational, clinical and research environments, can help faculty remain aware of the broader context which influences their work process and product. Without such an intervention, UMF and their peer faculty have little incentive to work through collaborative efforts or demonstrate leadership skills that help serve the mission of the institutions they serve a better world.

[1] US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (1993) EEO-6 Higher Education Staff Information Surveys, 1981 and 1991. Research Briefs 4, 6, American Counci