Drawing from the outside for support in teaching

Mentoring new nurse educators in their pedagogy is vital to their long-term success and their students' learning. It is also crucial to build mentoring into ongoing professional development plans because doctoral studies rarely include information on how to be an effective teacher. An overlooked resource on college campuses is the education department. This article describes the processes of a fruitful 2-year mentoring relationship between a new nurse educator and an education professor and offers a virtually no-cost strategy for improving the quality of teaching in schools, departments, and colleges of nursing. Using education faculty as mentors has two advantages over using fellow nursing faculty: pedagogy is their absolute professional expertise and the relationship may be less fraught with the potential baggage of peer evaluation because the mentors and mentees are in different departments. Trust, open communication, and clear goal-setting establish the framework for successful mentoring relationships.