Enhancing Graduate Education: Promoting a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Through Mentoring

This article highlights the importance of mentoring processes in the education of future scholars. The purpose is to recommend that scholars link the process of mentoring graduate students with promoting a scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). It suggests that through this process graduate students will acquire some of the skills they need to be successful in careers that require teaching as a central component of their work. Recommendations are provided for informal and formal mentoring initiatives. A promising path to improving graduate education is the relatively new emphasis in academia on broadly implementing a scholarship of teaching and learning, also referred to as SoTL. A scholarship of teaching and learning emphasizes learning and reflecting on pedagogical techniques as they relate to our academic disciplines. The purpose of this article is to recommend that scholars begin to link the process of mentoring graduate students with promoting a scholarship of teaching and learning. We argue that it is not sufficient in the current academic job market for graduate students just to acquire strong research skills. Instead, they also need to learn to be strong teachers as that has become a major component of most academic jobs. We hope that this discussion will lead academicians to reflect on how to better prepare future scholars and teachers for the realities of their careers. In the introductory essay of Universities and their Leadership, a collection of written works celebrating the 250 th