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Mentoring with Purpose

As a Harvard faculty member, you’ve likely been called upon to act as a mentor to your junior colleagues, postdocs, graduate students, and/or undergraduate advisees. How have you approached these relationships? What have you found to be effective? And which aspects of mentoring have you found to be difficult, or perhaps even stressful?

If you’d like to explore the topic of mentoring more deeply—to have the opportunity to engage with faculty colleagues in facilitated conversations about how to set boundaries, listen well, provide feedback, and cultivate your mentees’ independence—we hope you will join one of our Mentoring with Purpose cohorts in Fall 2022.

Read below for more information about the three-session Mentoring with Purpose curriculum, or jump to the bottom of the page to register for one of the Fall 2022 offerings.

About the Workshops

Mentoring with Purpose consists of three 2-hour sessions, focused on (1) Establishing a Framework and Boundaries, (2) Listening and Feedback, and (3) Removing the Scaffolding. You'll be invited to prepare for the sessions by doing some brief readings from books, articles, and online resources including Mario Small's Someone To Talk To, Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen's Thanks for the Feedback, and Michèle Lamont's How Professors Think, as well as materials like the recent report of the Tenure Track Review Committee. In the sessions, you'll have the opportunity to engage in activities and case-based discussions that will allow you to reflect and share your approaches and questions in a confidential and constructive environment. According to recent participants,

"From this seminar, I gained a new way of thinking about mentorship and being mentored. I am going into my own mentorship relationships with much more of a purposeful eye to what I seek to gain/what I need as a mentee and conversely, what my mentees might need (and being sure to ask/set clear guidelines up front)."

"The practical insights offered during the seminar helped me think through how I would ideally navigate mentoring scenarios. For example, the … case studies, scenarios from Mario Small's book, and texts on faculty decision making we used during the 'Advocating' session were exceptional resources for thinking about the practice, or pragmatic dimensions, of mentorship."

> Visit the Mentoring with Purpose Canvas site to learn more about the workshop curriculum, or scroll down to register below.

Meet your Facilitator

Adam Beaver's headshot.Adam Beaver is the Bok Center's Director of Pedagogy, in which capacity he provides leadership and strategic direction for the Bok Center's faculty programming. Before coming to the Bok Center, Adam was an assistant professor of History at Princeton, where he advised and mentored dozens of graduate students and was twice nominated for the university's graduate mentoring award.

At the Bok Center, Adam has taught a popular graduate seminar on mentoring since 2019. Among the feedback from recent participants:

"Adam is great as an instructor! He really helped set the tone of discussions by candidly sharing his personal experiences with mentoring and mentorship. I think this approach really helped encourage everyone to be open and frank about sharing their experiences too."