Mentoring Economically Disadvantaged Computing Students with a Growth Mindset: Embracing our Own Growth Mindset by Learning from First Faculty Perspectives of a Novel Endeavor

Both growth mindset and mentoring have been recognized as contributing toward student success. Grounded in theories of intelligence, a growth mindset asserts that intelligence is malleable and failures and struggles contribute to developing our skills and abilities, serving as stepping stones toward success. This contrasts with a fixed mindset where intelligence and abilities are considered to be set at birth, limiting success as challenges and hurdles become insurmountable experiences. While growth mindset has been addressed in the context of student and faculty activities in the classroom, this work is novel in that it examines the purposeful integration of growth mindset into faculty mentoring for computing students at the post-secondary level. In this innovative practice paper, we describe the growth mindset and mentoring experiences that faculty members participated in throughout the 2021 calendar year as well as how they prepared for the experience by developing and embracing their own growth mindset. Using qualitative data from semi-structured interviews, we share faculty members' perspectives on the novel endeavor of mentoring computing student scholars utilizing a growth mindset. Faculty mentors embraced the growth mindset mentoring and also revealed a variety of challenges in applying growth mindset to mentoring, along with how they tailored their growth mindset approaches throughout the semesters. Particular challenges centered around issues of race and other marginalized positions of the students. Faculty also described how the growth mindset mentoring experience positively shaped their work outside of the mentoring relationship, specifically in the classroom and other educational situations in addition to their family lives. As such, positive impacts of the interventions, which included the mentoring preparation, structure and implementation, may be seen beyond the set of student scholars who were being mentored. In the true spirit of embracing a growth mindset and continuously improving and building our own skillsets, both areas of success and areas for improvement are considered, particularly around using growth mindset mentoring to address issues students face regarding their race and marginalized positions. This work has implications for an overarching positive impact of establishing growth mindset mentoring ecosystems that may extend to a broader academic environment including many different programs as well as all faculty who impact and support (e.g. during instruction, office hours) a diverse student population.