Peer Power: How Faculty Peer Mentoring Can Transform Teaching

Let's talk about the thing nobody mentions in faculty meetings: teaching can be incredibly lonely.

You walk into your classroom, close the door, and do your thing. Maybe it goes great, maybe it's a disaster, but either way, you're on your own. Meanwhile, there are probably three people down the hall dealing with the exact same problems.

We collaborate on research all the time. But when it comes to teaching—the thing we spend most of our time doing—we act like solo performers.

Peer mentoring can fix this. Not the formal, bureaucratic kind. The real kind, where colleagues actually help each other get better.

Start With Coffee

Find someone in your department or college and say, "Hey, want to meet every other week and talk about teaching?"

That's it. No forms, no official anything. Just two people who teach, talking about teaching.

Talk about the lesson that bombed. The student question that stumped you. The assignment that turned into chaos. The weird tension in your Tuesday class you can't figure out.

Having someone to work through this stuff with—someone who gets it because they're doing it too—changes everything.

The Classroom Visit That Actually Helps

Peer observation is different from evaluation. Ask your partner to watch your class, but not to judge you. Ask them to just notice things:

●      What questions got the best responses?

●      When did energy shift?

●      Which students talked? Which didn't?

You're so busy teaching that you can't always see the patterns. One professor learned she only called on the front two rows. Another discovered he said "make sense?" seventeen times in fifty minutes.

You need someone else to notice.

The 15-Minute impromptu Conversation

"How do you handle students who dominate every discussion?"

"What's your policy for students who miss class and email asking 'did I miss anything important?'"

These quick check-ins add up. You're building a teaching community, not just a formal mentoring relationship.

Actually Talk About Failure

The most valuable conversations are about the stuff that didn't work.

That assignment that produced garbage? Figure out what went wrong together.

The class where nobody talked? What happened there?

We spend so much energy pretending everything is fine. Peer mentoring works when you can drop that and actually problem-solve the hard stuff.

Cross-Department Partners

Pairing with someone outside your department can be surprisingly valuable. A literature professor and a chemistry professor won't have content overlap, but they're dealing with the same issues: getting students to think critically, designing assessments, managing difficult conversations.

Sometimes an outside perspective offers solutions you wouldn't have thought of.

When It Doesn't Work

Sometimes personalities clash or it feels forced. That's okay. You don't need to keep meeting out of obligation.

The best peer mentoring relationships feel easy and energizing, not like another checkbox on your service requirements.

Just Start

Don't wait for your department to create a formal program. Don't wait for funding or official recognition.

Just ask someone you respect, "Want to meet and talk about teaching?"

Maybe you end up visiting each other's classes. Maybe you just vent and share strategies.

Maybe you solve a persistent problem together.

Whatever it turns into, it's better than figuring this out alone.

Here's the secret: everyone is making it up as they go. The difference is some people are making it up together, getting better faster, and having more fun doing it.

You could be one of those people. You just have to ask.