Faculty Peer Group Mentoring in Higher Education

This book addresses how peer group mentoring in higher education can contribute to the development of supportive and collaborative working environments for faculty staff. It draws on an extensive empirical study examining how group based peer-mentoring methods are implemented and experimented within four different academic communities at one university, and documents how these environments and their participants experience peer group mentoring as a collaborative measure in the development of teaching and supervision practices. The book presents a literature review of research on peer group mentoring in higher education and provides the conceptual grounding for the book, placing peer group mentoring within the field of faculty development.The work presents analyses of the enactment of peer group mentoring in different environments and of faculty peers engagement and collaboration with colleagues within the same teacher community, across teaching and supervision communities and across institutional boundaries. It also discusses the significance of trust in these peer group mentoring settings, summarises the implications of the reported findings and addresses the role this peer based approach might play in developing supportive collegiality in higher education as a working environment.

Thomas de Lange is Professor in higher education at the Department of Education, University of South-Eastern Norway. His research interests relate to teaching, assessment, supervision, and student learning. He has extensive experience as a faculty developer at the university level and co-leader of the project Faculty Peer Tutoring in Teaching and Supervision - Innovating Teacher Collaboration Practices in Norwegian Higher Education, together with Line Wittek. Line Wittek is Professor of Pedagogy at the University of Oslo. She researches Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, with a particular focus on student supervision, peer feedback and writing for learning. She is has been leading the project Faculty Peer Tutoring in Teaching and Supervision - Innovating Teacher Collaboration Practices in Norwegian Higher Education.