Statement of Mentoring Philosophy, 20 April 2017

“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.” ― Plutarch

“Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.” –Albert Einstein

“The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves.” — Steven Spielberg

“Stewardship of the discipline" is a formalization of what it means to be a scholar and teacher at the doctoral level, outlined by the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate in 2006. Stewardship is described as including both a commitment to the foundation (“heart and essence”) of one’s field, but also to thoughtful and innovative forward momentum and development of one’s field for the future. I am a cognitive scientist and a research methodologist – and I strive to be a steward of my specific disciplines (statistics and cognitive science), but through my collaborations with other investigators across multiple disciplines, I also strive to be a steward of science generally.  As a researcher, the stewardship is evidenced by my publications and scholarly writing. As a teacher and mentor, the stewardship is more challenging to document. However, I intend my teaching and mentorship to promote thoughtful and innovative forward momentum of my junior collaborators and students – and their respective disciplines. That is the only way to ensure the vigour and development of one’s field for the future, so I try to promote this perspective in those with whom I work.

I spent the first three years of my first PhD program (1991-1997) teaching undergraduates as a teaching assistant (TA), and the next three teaching other PhD students how to teach and serving as their teaching mentor as a teaching assistant consultant (TAC); but I have not had many opportunities to teach in the 24 years since I first become one of two TACs for the School of Social Sciences. While I have maintained a very active teaching portfolio, including updating my statements of teaching philosophy periodically, this (April 2017) is my first statement of mentoring philosophy. I created a curriculum development and evaluation tool called a Mastery Rubric, initially in 2006 but first published in 2010. An important feature of this tool is the potential to articulate what evidence might be considered requisite for someone to be considered “qualified to teach” in the curriculum, which first appeared in 2012. The key characteristic of the Master level performer in any Mastery Rubric is evidence of their ability to diagnose and remediate individuals who perform at earlier, less-expert levels of whatever the curriculum is intended to deliver. Therefore, in my mentoring, I strive to encourage mentees to understand how to diagnose and how to remediate both themselves and their own future mentees. This is facilitated by my background in cognitive science, but also by my 2nd PhD in Measurement, Statistics, and Evaluation, which was set in a College of Education. One of the most important lessons from that program were three features of valid assessment, articulated by S. Messick in 1994:

1. What is/are the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) that students should possess (at the end of the curriculum)?

2. What actions/behaviours by the students will reveal these KSAs?

3. What tasks will elicit these specific actions or behaviours?

I have applied these three questions to interactions with mentees and learners at all levels and across disciplines ever since learning about them in a course on “evidence-centered design” in 2004. That course was focused on the design of assessments, but was instrumental in forming and formalizing my thinking about how curricula, courses, and teaching can and must also be designed with these three questions in mind.  Embarking on new mentoring relationships always starts with a conversation with the mentee around goals and how the goals might be demonstrated (and why). Putting together a portfolio, or otherwise curating evidence of goal setting and accomplishment (by the mentee) and support of those accomplishments (by the mentor -me) are an important focus. While I have been fortunate in the mentorship that I have received, I seek to limit the role of “luck” in obtaining quality mentorship, and try to promote purposeful and evidence-driven excellence in both the provision of mentorship and the development of new mentors. I use the Mastery Rubric and the “Messick Three” to guide my decisions about mentorship so that what we do is as concrete as possible. If it works, we can discuss how and why; if it doesn’t work, we can also discuss how and why. If what happened can’t be processed, if it was “lucky”, then it cannot be repeated reliably – by me or by the mentee when they have mentees of their own.  I try to model and encourage reflection on what did happen, or what might have happened, to make sure it can either be re-created or avoided in the future.

The Mastery Rubric is intended to be public and shared- a sort of contract for the level of performance that a mentee or student should expect to achieve. Sharing this developmental path is intended to make the student or mentee a partner and collaborator in their own growth and development. The Mastery Rubric as a construct and tool therefore captures and represents my belief that students and mentees are collaborators and partners in education, not receptacles to be filled with 'knowledge'. It also demonstrates my commitment to transparency and reproducibility as an instructor and a mentor. Looking forward to the next 20 (or more) years as an instructor and mentor, I foresee myself creating and taking opportunities to engage new students, mentees, and even collaborators in opportunities to create themselves as stewards, and to kindle their inner fires to develop their own commitments to the vigour of their fields and to science generally.

I think it can be intimidating for mentees to encounter my encouragement that they try new things, including “reflection” and “metacognition” – and that they embrace knowledge of both their strengths and their weaknesses. I tell them about the litany of spectacular (and consistent) failures throughout my career in and outside of academia, because failure is normal; failure is an opportunity to learn; and failure is evidence that you tried something just beyond your reach. None of this positive spin was apparent to me when I was experiencing these abject failures, but I somehow manage to fail consistently as I bootstrap my way along my particular career path. When I have told a potential mentee that I view mentorship as a partnership, and that I cannot help if they do not contribute, there has been resistance. Several individuals have opted to choose another mentor (once the mentee chose another career!)– which I consider to be a huge success for the mentee: being assigned to receive mentorship but recognizing that “something is lacking” – and then seeking it purposefully elsewhere –is concrete evidence of growing self-awareness. 

Because I do not have a laboratory and do not have training opportunities for students or junior colleagues, I am free to focus our efforts, and the mentee’s attention, on their own growth. This rather unique mentoring context also serves to underline the fact that the mentee is a responsible partner in constructing their unique path to success in any of the goals we set; that is, their achievements cannot be dictated or driven by my own work or agenda. This is a constructivist, and highly individualized metacognitive, strategy and can be wholly novel and (therefore) quite uncomfortable for those in the biologic/biomedical and quantitative sciences. Recognizing – and encouraging the development of the abilities to recognize – this discomfort is how I teach and model metacognition around the constructivist experience. I am much more constructivist as a mentor than as an instructor, but both my teaching and mentoring are strongly aligned with Vygotskian scaffolding: explicit and concrete to start, but with an articulated trajectory that will involve decreasing scaffolding over time –culminating in independence. A sole-authored, paper in press  at Briefings in Bioinformatics (2017) (“Degrees of Freedom Analysis in educational research and decision-making: Leveraging qualitative and survey data to promote excellence in bioinformatics training and education”) describes a natural experiment that occurred about 10 years ago in a course with scaffolding around the final project (as well as describing the Degrees of Freedom Analysis method as I have modified it for survey data and educational decision-making). That experiment is the source of my current commitment to a developmental path that starts with more scaffolding and ends in independent performance (when the paper is published I will link to it in my Teaching Portfolio).

For mentees of mine who have students or labs, we can discuss how their learning how to direct themselves purposefully is only part of the challenge- they must also learn to do this explicitly and “on demand”, in order to reliably teach and train others.  This mindset is not relevant for everyone, and it is possible that potential mentees are warned off and/or never even contact me because of my interest in, and commitment to, stewardship of a discipline, and not of the mentee’s CV or career success per se. Evidence that this type of mentorship does have appeal to specific individuals comes from invitations to mentor those in different institutions and countries. As of April 2017, I am mentoring individuals at all stages of career (early, middle, late) in three different countries outside the US, as well as two early-career individuals in my own institution.

I have been invited to develop and deliver workshops on goal-setting and documenting how/when progress is being made towards those goals for international (July 2017) and national (October 2017) conferences around statistics and data sciences. These recent (arising in 2016) invitations tend to support my claim that my focus on metacognition is rare in professional preparation for the quantitative sciences, at least – people are interested in what is ‘new’ or ‘different’. I also look forward to supporting the development of scientific and disciplinary stewardship as I Chair the Committee on Professional Ethics of the American Statistical Association 2017-2019, engaging statistical practitioners around the world and at all levels of training and achievement with the Ethical Guidelines for Statistical Practice (and thereby, creating new opportunities to do so). My publications around teaching and learning of ethics and ethical reasoning all tend to encourage a scaffolded approach that is sustained throughout a curriculum, although I recognize that many instructors are hard pressed to even integrate ethics/ethical reasoning into a single course.

It seems appropriate to have taken 24 years to formulate such a philosophy, since it took that time to assemble sufficient expertise to perhaps be considered eligible to independently mentor others. But, just as the quotes that I’ve chosen to orient a reader to my philosophy are essentially reflections of the same perspective that has not changed since Plutarch (46-125 AD), my philosophy towards mentorship is also unchanged over these 20+ years: my objective is to train the mind to support a career of stewardly science, and kindle a fire in the mentee so that they will always seek more and better engagement with other stewards and with excellent science. While this might seem to actually move my mentees closer to “my own image” (contrary to the quote attributed to Steven Spielberg), in fact it always promotes their discovery of their own paths, almost universally away from mine. As long as they can be proud of themselves and their work, and of those they then go on to purposefully mentor themselves, my mission is accomplished. It is this self-development that is the real purpose of constructivist aspects of my mentorship; I feel that students may have too many distractions (including “getting a good grade”) to benefit from constructivist exercises. Those who are, or are trying to become, independent must learn to manage those distractions because forging their scientific programs – and their “research brand” – will be principal objectives and must be self-developed to some extent. If I am allowed to influence this development as a mentor, I aim to support the incorporation of metacognition and stewardship, transparency and commitment, into everything my mentees do and how they engage in their professional practice.