Virtual Mentoring During and After a Pandemic
6.5 Lessons Learned
The following table summarizes some of the undergraduate research mentoring lessons learned during the pandemic.
Table 3: Lessons Learned from Pandemic Mentoring
| Be flexible yet consistent about meetings | Check in with mentees in short bursts that are mutually convenient. Consider recording meetings and messages for mentees unable to attend meetings or research prerequisite seminars. Encourage mentees to work in groups, and schedule online interactions where you as mentor may regularly check in on tasks. |
| Be generous with encouragement and praise | Be mindful that tone is lost when communicating through email. Virtual environments necessitate more communication to make connections. Review any communication, as messages may wind up buried or lost. Be conscientious in recognizing good work. Encourage mentees to ask questions and seek assistance when needed. Provide mentees with constructive feedback that is timely, and encourage them more often when working in a virtual environment that removes that mentee from face-to-face interactions with the mentor. |
| Break goals down into manageable pieces
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Work with your mentee to create outlines, develop workplans and keep a research journal. In a time of transition, long-term goals are unrealistic. Work with your mentee to break goals down into manageable one-semester goals, such as 1, 2 and 3-month goals. For the second semester, examine the previous short-term goals and fashion, 6, 9 and 12-month goals with associated milestones. Celebrate achievements. |
| Create and participate in virtual social events | Building rapport and support among students in undergraduate research is a benefit of mentorship. Creating virtual social events brings mentors and mentees together outside of isolated meetings. Virtual events may increase opportunities for exciting guest speakers, including graduate students and other researchers from other institutions who would like to share their experiences. Allow breakout rooms to delve deeper into topic exploration. Share research notebooks to stress creative accountability, and play games to inject levity into your research programs. Put your research mixers and final poster or presentation events on virtual platforms to make connections and share out praise for mentee accomplishments. |
| Focus on how learning takes place | Capitalize on the ways education has shifted to more visual means of facilitating knowledge transfer. Use visual aids, such as charts, checklists, online applications, or shared documents with your mentees to help visualize goals and meet milestones. Employ use of messaging apps. Times of high anxiety call for a visual list of individual steps, which can be checked off as completed. |
| Lead by example
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Engage your mentee in conversation. Address what is and is not working for you and what you are trying to do to reduce your own stress while improving your productivity. Be vulnerable. Let your mentee know about your life outside teaching, as well as the load of teaching within the boundaries of professionalism. Show your humanness by addressing balance, mindfulness, and stress relief. Set the example that you know challenges are expected, but that you are focused on creating an exciting yet safe environment in which you and your mentee can be authentic. |
| Pay attention to the psychosocial needs of your mentee
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Now is the time when you may need to pay more attention to the psychosocial needs of the mentee. Let them know there are places and spaces to share their cognitive and emotional burden, and how to handle family and social pressures. Mentees might need extra motivation or support. Some mentees may need more solitude. Other mentees may not know what to ask for in times of need. As mentors, ask open-ended questions such as, “What are you feeling today? What is on your mind right now?” Observe for subtle changes in appearance, behavior, or responsiveness. |
| Set up shared virtual workspaces | Allow you and your mentee to communicate in shared virtual workspaces in addition to physical workspaces. Zoom and Free Conference Call encourage checking in and sharing ideas. Virtual workspaces encourage mastery of communication via technology, where documents, notes, research papers, and videos are accessible to individuals and teams. Continue to allow virtual shared spaces for meetings to accommodate the mentee who prefers to virtually meet or who has challenges getting to campus. Group work or project teams can be easily assigned tasks they can share out among mentees, and that mentees can share with you. Mentees can use Google Docs for the storage and transfer of documentation. For sensitive data, check which platforms are best for sharing and storing information found during undergraduate research. |
Adapted from Browne (2021), Candelaria et al., (2021), Naughton (2021), Pérez-Jorge et al., (2020), Shelvam et al., (2021), and Supriyanto et al., (2020).
COVID-19 has created an environment where faculty need to mentor students remotely, under disruptive circumstances. The following case study allows us to ponder how to refocus when engaging in online mentoring.
Case Study: Building Engaging Online Communities
Professor Katiyah knows that a virtual undergraduate research experience can be focused on assignments such as literature review to engage students in research even when they are not able to physically be in the lab. Two mentees, Maria and Anna, reach out to Professor Katiyah for a remote one-semester science research literature project with an ensuing mini-review term paper and oral presentation. Professor Katiyah suggests the topics for the two independent projects and leaves it up to the students to decide the direction of their research. The idea was that students gain sufficient independence to drive a project from beginning to end and take responsibility for the success of completion of the project. Therefore, Professor Katiyah does not schedule regular meetings to check on progress, but allows students to schedule meeting times when they are ready to discuss their progress. The mentees are also encouraged to communicate via email whenever they have questions and need feedback.
One mentee, Maria is very well organized and independent in literature search and building her project. She has questions to ask in the meetings and clearly makes progress throughout the semester. On the other hand, Anna does not have a clear plan in which direction the review project should go. Professor Katiyah continues to encourage Anna to be independent, but as the semester progresses, Anna falls behind and starts to get more frustrated with the project. It becomes clear that Anna needs more input and guidance, especially in the beginning phase of the project, to complete the project in time.
Reflection: In what ways could Professor Katiyah help her mentee Anna plan for one milestone at a time? How could the mentor help the mentee regain motivation and make progress? How could Professor Katiyah enable meetings in the virtual setting?
Post-pandemic norms require more personal communication between mentors and their mentees, especially given the lack of social contact. Meeting virtually still allows for sharing experiences and associated hardships, which in turn may solidify the mentoring relationship. For example, it may be considerably easier to reschedule virtual meetings due to personal or work related issues, a flexibility perhaps not feasible with face-to-face interactions. The online environment therefore facilitates a more individualized type of mentoring and effective communicating (Conrad & Donaldson, 2004). Moving forward, Professor Katiyah plans to teach students in a more guided fashion to be self-directed learners. For long project assignments such as this one, students should develop a work plan, create an outline at the beginning of the semester, and plan how to manage their time effectively (Boettcher & Conrad, 2016). Asking students to break down big assignments into smaller tasks and having regular check-ins with students allows for more feedback and can help students stay on track (if necessary). Studies show that students respond positively to structured assignments, indicating that having them track their progress and reach those small milestones helps them see their progress and improvement over the semester (Roper, 2007).
