This primarily audience for this post is professional developers in higher education.
After a workshop in the early part of the summer, attendees go back home... and then the calendar unceremoniously flips to August. Fall semester is approaching, and summer is ending. All of the ideas learned at the summer workshop have to intersect with reality. Real students are coming, the syllabus needs to be written, choices need to be made, and the LMS needs to be set up. During this phase instructors new or newish to IBL can benefit from the community they worked with at the workshop.
Email mentoring doesn't sound exciting. It sounds like "having to mow the lawn after a long week." I apologize for the unexciting, descriptive title. But in reality email mentoring is important for participants and truly rewarding and fun.
What is email mentoring? Email mentoring is follow-up support after workshops, and is organized by workshop facilitators. Facilitators email the whole group every two or three weeks to check-in on the group, asking participants to share how planning or teaching is going. Participants have questions before the start of the term, and issues or questions might come up during the term, or they may have a success story to share with the group.
A typical pattern is the facilitators send out a few emails to see how people are doing, and a few responses trickle in. But then eventually there are times when you get large threads. Someone has a question. Another participant chimes in. And then another chime. A facilitator thanks the people who chimed in, and asks for more thoughts. More people chime in, and it's a flurry of helpful, insightful, and supportive messages.
Activity ebbs and flows within a semester. Email mentoring starts a few weeks before the term and is heavily used during the parts of the first half of the term. Activity tends to pick up again towards the end of the term, when facilitators encourage participants to share and reflect on the semester.
Email mentoring is a type of follow-up support. Follow-up support is a broad category of continuing professional development after the main workshop. Follow-up is the booster to the summer prime doses, and strengthens and enhances what was accomplished in the summer.
One common example of follow-up support is having monthly meetings, which is more common for professional development programs that take place in a specific region, such as a single campus or in the K-12 setting of a school or school district.
Meeting regularly during the school year makes sense in cases where all the instructors are in the same geographic area. You can continue to support workshop participants as they are implementing their courses, get together over boxed lunches, and get folks outside of their environments. Video conference call is another option to do this for groups that are more spread out.
Email mentoring especially makes sense for undergraduate math instructors, because of the asynchronous nature of email. Everyone uses email, and access to the conversation fits into faculty work life. Scheduling faculty meetings is also a big challenge, because finding a common time across multiple time zones with 20-30 faculty is nearly impossible. Hence, asynchronous email exchanges make sense in this context.
Email mentoring also does not require prep like the summer workshops. The main thing is being effective with timing and being kindly persistent and supportive. Thinking about this work as building community rather than "getting lots of chimes" is a more useful mindset.
Why is follow-up support important? As mentioned above, learning about IBL, active learning, or any other topic during the summer is great for getting over the "activation energy" needed to start the change. But implementation in the real world requires steady work, and having a community of collaborators doing the same thing can make a difference in how much and how well someone implements new teaching changes (to them). In some instances, follow-up support can make or break an implementation attempt. I think of follow-up support as an important part of the workshop.
Some people are teaching in departments where they are the only one doing active learning. They feel isolated, and going to a workshop for a week is a refreshing change. Having their community still with them during the term via email mentoring gives folks working alone much needed support and camaraderie.
How do you ping the groups? We use low-entry, high-ceiling prompts.
"Hi everyone,
Hope your week is off to a good start. Please let us know how things are going with your teaching. Even if you don't have a lot of time, please feel free to click 'reply-all' and send us just a sentence or two. We want to know how you are doing.
Cheers!
SY"
The idea is to make participating easy and it can be a short update or something more involved.
Sometimes the facilitators send out informational emails, and they usually don't get many replies, although they can spark a thread on a topic usually not directly related to the original information being shared. Perhaps there is a good article worth sharing or a conference or workshop coming up. Those kinds of messages keep the community informed and in people's minds.
Repeatedly checking in the with group is necessary. Sometimes it takes a multiple tries to get a thread going. This is normal and fine. Not every email needs or should have a lengthy response from a large number of participants. The strategy is to gently check in regularly, because eventually someone will want or need to run something by the group, and you'll have primed people that chiming in is okay and welcome.
Emotional content is a key component of successful email mentoring. What does emotional content mean in this context? Examples are thanking people for sharing, validating the struggle, and celebrating successes. Here's an example.
"Hi ABC - thank you for sharing that story. I have been in that situation before several times, and you handled it better than I did the first time. Here's what I learned along the way... Does anyone else have anything to share? Please chime in - it'd be great if we had more perspectives. - SY"
Emotional content is often short and sweet.
(Participant) "Hi everyone! Just had a great day in class..."
(Another participant) "That's wonderful!..."
(Facilitator) "Thank you so much for sharing that story. Congrats!"
(More compliments...)
One thing to keep in mind is timing. You want other participants to chime in, so facilitators need to carefully time their messages so they are not pouncing on all of the questions right away or letting big gaps of time go by. Perhaps they can let a day or two go by and encourage someone to chime in. Facilitators can chime in with, "That's a great question. Does someone have something they'd like to share?" to amplify the question without answering.
Why email and not slack/discord/teams? I personally would prefer to use something like Discord or a discussion board. But the reality is that you lose people from the group post workshop if you use slack/discord/teams/etc. Only a subset will take the extra step to login and check another platform that is not email. This has been an consistent barrier for all the years I have run workshops. Email is the one consistent way to reach everyone.There are definitely pros and cons to email, but in the end, the kicker is that email is the one universal platform out there that everyone already uses.
Email mentoring is fun and rewarding! Email mentoring is great, because you get to learn about what people are doing, help people with their questions, be part of a supportive community, learn new ideas, and celebrate successes. It's many of the good parts of being an educator rolled into one activity.
Email mentoring is a helpful and fun strategy to implement follow-up mentoring post workshop, especially when working with busy faculty schedules. One way to think about it is that you already spent all that effort planning and running your workshop, and you want it to stick. One way to help ensure students experience the benefits of high-impact practices like IBL is to help your attendees when they are implementing your workshop ideas.
Want to learn more? Read Chuck and Sandra's paper super-detailed analysis of what we did to create a supportive community using feedback loops, which helped us achieve high response rates. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-018-0120-9
"This workshop for 35 college mathematics instructors used online and in-person communities to provide support to participants during the post-workshop period of “refreezing.” Almost all workshop attendees participated in “e-mentoring” (94%), primarily through a productive, engaging group email listserv. By combining qualitative coding of message content with the techniques of social network analysis, we reveal how facilitators and participants on the group listserv provided intellectual and emotional support, as well as positive reinforcement through feedback loops. The analysis also shows how the facilitators made this a helpful group and maintained participant engagement through frequent encouragement, deliberate community building, and thoughtfully timed responses."
Edit: One pitfall to avoid giving up too early. Sometimes you will send out an email and no one will respond. And then you try it again, and no one will respond. Don't give up. Keep on asking nicely, perhaps send out some info, or share something from your class, and end with open invitations.
