Student Success and Retention Conference 2025

Mentorship can be a transformative tool for student success, but effective mentorship doesn’t happen by chance—it requires intention, strategy, and adaptability. This session will take a practical, hands-on approach to building mentorship programs that work.  We’ll explore how to identify and prepare mentors who inspire growth and inclusion, navigate common challenges like mismatched expectations or ineffective mentors, and empower mentees to build diverse mentoring networks that meet their unique development needs. Key topics include:  Recruiting and training mentors with empathy, cultural humility, and adaptability. Understanding when to pivot from a mentoring relationship with a "no-fault divorce." Building a mentor network tailored to specific growth areas, like leadership, storytelling, or strategic thinking. Structuring mentorship relationships to fit different timelines, from short-term to situational engagements. Attendees will engage in interactive activities to design mentor maps and practice strategies for managing and gracefully ending mentoring relationships. They’ll leave with actionable tools to create impactful mentoring programs that empower students while fostering a culture of inclusion and growth.

Although you may think of Restorative Justice as being primarily about repairing harm or as a tool to replace punitive forms of discipline, restorative justice principles can also be used to proactively build the relationships and skills we need to support one another, to put voice to our concerns, and to navigate challenging situations. This session will explore one of the central tools of restorative justice practice, the Circle. Circles can be used in classrooms and with colleagues to build community and to repair harm. We will take time to provide some context and history of Circles as well as to demonstrate some Circle elements. We will also offer space to collectively consider ways we might be able to integrate Circles into our own higher education settings.