Mentoring Excellence: What do the Mentors Gain from Graduate Teaching Assistant Peer Mentoring?

Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) often find themselves straddling the line between their roles as research students and members of the faculty engaged in teaching responsibilities. Their pivotal contribution to the quality of undergraduate education and their potential impact on student retention cannot be understated. To elevate GTA teaching methodologies and garner well-deserved recognition, a promising avenue is the pursuit of professional accreditations; for example, the Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA) through Advance HE. This requires GTAs to reflect on their teaching and to think about pedagogies that enhance their practice. To aid in this practice, mentoring is helpful in supporting GTAs to achieve this.
This paper provides insights and reflections by a group of GTA mentors on their support for other GTAs in their application for AFHEA. From written interviews the experiences of GTA mentors are analysed with a thematic discovery approach to identify key themes for what mentors have learned, what they take from the process, and what issues with the mentee engagement and performance they observe. This allows the development of best practice advice and understanding of the benefits of being a mentor. Based on our findings, we argue that collaborative support of GTA mentors is required, and that successful support enables mentors themselves to develop their skills.