LEAD 6163 Module 3 Professional Development and Mentoring Plan Example

From Expert Nurse to Novice Teacher, Again and Again: A Two-Year Development and Mentoring Program for New Nursing Faculty in a Department Losing Its Senior Members

Student Name

American College of Education

LEAD6163: Management of Human Capital

Module 3 Assignment

Instructor Name

October 26, 2026

Introduction

If the Module 2 recruitment strategy works, the department will gain as many as 30 new faculty over five years, many of them experienced nurses who have never taught full time. At the same time, Module 1 found that nine senior faculty are likely to retire within five years, taking with them doctoral preparation and knowledge of the clinical partnerships the department depends on. This paper designs a two-year development and mentoring program that addresses both problems: helping new faculty become effective teachers and moving senior faculty's firm-specific knowledge to the people who will inherit it.

The Transition New Faculty Face

Schoening (2013) built a model of the move into teaching by interviewing nurses who moved from clinical practice into academic roles, describing four phases: an anticipatory phase shaped by expectations of the new role, a period of disorientation in which the expert clinician feels like a novice, an information-seeking phase in which the new educator looks for help and models, and the formation of an identity as an educator. The model matches what our new faculty describe. A nurse who managed critically ill patients with confidence finds herself unsure how to write a test question or respond to a student in tears, and the disorientation can last most of the first year. Two of the department's last six hires described that first year in exit interviews as the reason they left, which makes the disorientation phase a retention problem as much as a teaching one.

What Mentoring Can Do

Nowell et al. (2017) systematically reviewed 34 studies of mentorship in nursing academia and found that mentored faculty mostly fared better in what they did, how their careers moved, how they felt about the work, how they related to colleagues and how driven they were, while noting that the methodological quality of most studies was weak. The evidence is encouraging rather than conclusive, which argues for a mentoring program that is carefully structured and measured rather than one that simply pairs people and hopes. Kram (1985), in foundational work on mentoring relationships, separated the help mentors give a protege's career, opening doors, coaching and stretch assignments, from the help they give the person, serving as an example, offering acceptance and listening. New faculty in disorientation need both.

Program Design: Year One

Every new full-time faculty member will receive a reduced teaching load in the first semester, three-quarters of the usual load, and a mentor from among senior faculty. Mentor and mentee will meet weekly for the first eight weeks and every two weeks thereafter. The first-year curriculum follows the transition phases. Before the first semester, an orientation week covers course design, test construction and grading policies, addressing the anticipatory phase with accurate expectations. During the first semester, the mentor observes one class and one clinical day each month and debriefs within a week, which supports the new educator through disorientation. A monthly new-faculty seminar, led in rotation by experienced faculty, covers topics new faculty request, giving the information-seeking phase a structure.

Program Design: Year Two

In the second year the emphasis shifts to identity and contribution. Each second-year faculty member leads a small improvement project in a course they teach, presents it to the faculty and begins a scholarly or service commitment matched to their interests. Mentoring meetings become monthly. Faculty pursuing doctoral study receive one course release each year while enrolled, protecting the department's long-term need for doctoral preparation. By the end of year two, each faculty member will also have co-led at least one clinical placement negotiation with a partner hospital, so that the skill of building partnerships is learned by doing it, not by watching it.

Knowledge Transfer From Retiring Faculty

The program's second purpose is to keep firm-specific knowledge in the department. Senior faculty within five years of retirement will mentor first, and each mentoring pair will include a specific transfer of a clinical partnership. The retiring faculty member will introduce the mentee to the unit managers, educators and preceptors at one or two partner sites, take the mentee along to placement negotiations and hand over responsibility for that site's placements gradually over a year. A clinical partnership that lives in one person's phone contacts is a single point of failure; mentoring can turn it into a relationship the department owns. Senior mentors will receive a stipend and a course release, recognizing that this is real work.

Preparing and Matching Mentors

Good clinicians are not automatically good mentors, and senior faculty near retirement may be tired or ambivalent about the role. Mentors will attend a half-day workshop on mentoring functions, giving feedback after observations and recognizing the signs of a new colleague in the disorientation phase, such as withdrawal or excessive hours. Matching will consider three things: clinical specialty, so that a new medical-surgical faculty member learns from someone who knows those placements; the partnerships to be transferred; and personal fit, judged by a short conversation before pairing. Each pair can ask for a change after the first semester without explanation, because a mismatched pair can do more harm than none. Mentors will meet as a group twice a semester to compare notes, which also gives senior faculty a forum to shape how their knowledge is passed on rather than simply being asked to hand it over.

Development for Adjuncts

The 31 clinical adjuncts, who supervise most clinical hours, need a lighter version of the same support. Each semester they will attend a paid three-hour workshop on clinical teaching and evaluation and will be observed once by a full-time faculty member. Adjuncts who complete two years of good evaluations will be invited into the teaching fellowship described in Module 2, linking development to recruitment.

Measures

The program will be judged on four measures: how many new faculty are still teaching here three years after hire, against the department's recent record of losing about one in four new hires within three years; new faculty members' own ratings of confidence in teaching, collected each semester; student course evaluations and peer observation ratings for new faculty, compared with department averages once the second year closes; and the number of clinical partnerships with a second faculty contact who knows the site well. Given the weak evidence base Nowell et al. (2017) described, the department will also gather mentors' and mentees' accounts each year to learn what in the program actually helped.

Cost

The program's main costs are the reduced first-semester load for new faculty, about one quarter of a position per hire, mentor stipends and releases and the adjunct workshops. At five or six new hires a year, the total is roughly $95,000 a year. Against that, the department estimates that each early departure costs about $45,000 in search expenses, adjunct coverage and lost productivity, so preventing two early departures a year would cover the program.

Conclusion

A department losing its senior faculty while hiring many new ones has a narrow window to transfer knowledge and build teaching skill. This program uses mentoring for both, structured around the transition new nurse educators actually experience and measured so the department can learn what works. Module 4 will turn to performance management and retention, the conditions that determine whether developed faculty stay.

References

Kram, K. E. (1985). Mentoring at work: Developmental relationships in organizational life. Scott, Foresman.

Nowell, L., Norris, J. M., Mrklas, K., & White, D. E. (2017). Mixed methods systematic review exploring mentorship outcomes in nursing academia. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 73(3), 527-544. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.13152

Schoening, A. M. (2013). From bedside to classroom: The nurse educator transition model. Nursing Education Perspectives, 34(3), 167-172. https://doi.org/10.5480/1536-5026-34.3.167