The Role of the Mentor

Each learner is assigned a mentor when they start the MHPE program to assist in developing and executing an individualized learning plan. This approach respects your role in setting the agenda for your own learning and development. The mentor will act as a partner and guide during your time in the program by:

• • Meeting regularly (typically twice each month) to discuss progress and set goals

  • Working with you to develop and pursue a learning plan which is suitable to your professional and developmental context

  • Assist you in determining how your current work activities relate to EPAs

  • Help you reflect on overall progress, goals, and application to your career

  • Support for general networking and advancement in educational role and career

The Role of the Subject Matter Expert (SME)

The role of the SME includes the following:

• • Meet with learners synchronously or asynchronously, to support them in pursuing completion of designated EPAs

  • Serve as a facilitator for learners by identifying resources that the learners will find useful.

  • Provide guidance and feedback during selected learning activities

  • Refer learners to relevant articles and studies that are relevant to their project or activity

  • Ensure that learners can articulate key constructs and apply them

  • Help interpret the text in the EPA as it applies to individual projects

  • Offer feedback on draft EPA submissions

  • Interface with the assessment committee and interpret the committee reports (and guide revisions)

  • Foster learner interactions around EPAs for mutual teaching, support, and feedback

Preparing EPAs

General Guidance

• • Review the blue/green text describing the assessment criteria for the EPA prior to submission to make sure all elements of the required/optional competencies are included in your submission.

  • Organize the submission to help the assessors find the competency evidence readily.

    • Include headings in the documentation

    • Provide a table of contents for the EPA, especially if it is complex and contains appendices

    • Create individual sections or appendices if the EPA is a big product, like a grant, and the competencies need separate explanation

  • include correctly formatted citations to the literature where appropriate. EPAs are scholarly products and need to reflect existing knowledge and theory.

    • Resource: APA Formatting and Style Guide (7th ed), Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL)

  • Shakespeare’s advice applies: “Brevity is the soul of wit.” It applies to papers, grants, presentations, and most all forms of communication.

    • Many EPAs have an independent product (e.g., grant proposal, paper or report, review), the length of which is defined by the practical implementation of that EPA, In other words, a grant proposal may be limited to 5 pages and a scholarly manuscript needs to be as long as is necessary to fully communicate the study or idea. We aren’t defining a page limit for these core products. They are what they are.

    • On average 2-4 pages per competency should be sufficient to describe your evidence for each competency requested. It is difficult to provide the necessary evidence in much less than 2 (single spaced) pages (although it has been done well in less than two pages). More than 4 pages often becomes more detailed than is necessary. For example, an EPA that targets 4 competencies would probably range from 8-16 pages (not including the appendices for the “product” of the EPA).

Provide Context

• • this is particularly important and valuable for the assessment committee to be able to make judgements about your competence.

  • Describe your role in the project. Tell your story as if the reviewers know nothing about your project.

    • How/why did you become involved in this project?

    • Describe the work YOU did on the project and how the work was assigned. You do not need to be the leader to use the project for an EPA

    • What was your role in the development of the materials/products?

  • Describe the future plans for or status of the project

  • State if the project or activity was conducted prior to your enrollment in the MHPE program. Completed projects/activities will require more reflection (see reflection section below)

Reflection

• • These reflections help illustrate your understanding, judgment and analysis of the educational principles and competencies in the EPA.

  • The lack of reflective evidence for a given competency is one of the reasons the Assessment Committee asks for additional evidence in appraising an EPA submission.

  • Reflective writing is not traditional scholarly writing. Use “I” and active voice, not “it” and passive voice (e.g., “an evaluation was conducted”), to make clear who did what.

  • Tell us the story of your work. Don’t be humble – toot your own horn. Some learners tend to minimize their accomplishments. This is the forum to put it all out there (within reason).

  • Many of the competencies (e.g., personal leadership) are not clearly evident in what happened in a project, but are personal skills and problem solving that you need to explain to the assessors.

  • Describe WHAT you did and WHY you did it.

    • a key part of competency evidence comes from your own reflection on the activity and your thinking, decision making, and judgment. Your judgment and insight is difficult to infer from “objective” data – we need your personal account of why you did what you did. This means writing in the first person –

      • “I judged that this was the best way to approach this problem”

      • “If I were doing this now, I would change this or that action or decision.”

      • “I chose theory A over theory B because…”

    • As much as the EPA tells the assessors WHAT you did it, it is also important to explain to the assessors WHY you did it. How did you see the problem? What alternatives did you consider? Why did you go the way you did? What would you do differently now? These kinds of questions are key components of a competent educator who can thoughtfully and creatively address new educational challenges.

State the limitations/barriers

• • Describe relevant limitations you had to deal with in implementing your project and in creating the materials/product (e.g., time, access to learners, stakeholder buy-in, specialized expertise, logistics, etc.)

Requesting Additional Competencies

The process for a learner to request either a waiver to exclude a required competency in an EPA or to request credit for a competency that is neither required nor optional in an EPA is explained in this section. While this is not recommended, the Curriculum and Assessment Committee Chairs understand that there may be instances that this is a reasonable request. For example, when a learner is nearing the end of the program, they may be in a situation that an EPA they select gives them credit for competencies they need in order to graduate but there is a required competency they have already earned the two required credits for in previous EPAs.

To request a waiver

The blue boxes on the Competency Map indicate core elements of an EPA. The learner must still submit evidence addressing the waived competency (i.e., if theory is a big part of an EPA, the learner may mention the theory but may not be required to critically analyze it) in order for the EPA to be a complete product.

The process to request a waiver is:

• 1. The Learner should talk to their mentor to determine if the request is reasonable

  2. If reasonable, the Learner should contact Dawn Harris to confirm the credits are already earned

  3. If Dawn Harris approves, the learner should send an email with the waiver request to Larry Gruppen (lgruppen@umich.edu)

  4. If approved by Dr. Gruppen, the learner should include the approval email with the EPA submission sent to Tom Fitzgerald

To request credit for a competency that is neither required nor optional

If a learner is planning on doing an EPA and including a competency that is neither required nor optional (white box) they must contact Dawn Harris or Larry Gruppen for the submission criteria and approval needed to show competence BEFORE submitting an EPA to the Assessment Committee.

• • 1. The learner should talk to their mentor or SME to determine if the request is reasonable

    2. If reasonable, the learner should send an email with the competency criteria and justification for the request to Larry Gruppen or Dawn Harris for approval.

    3. If approved, the learner should include the approval email with the EPA submission sent to Tom Fitzgerald.

Assessment

Submitting EPAs for Assessment

Process

email submissions to: Tom Fitzgerald, tfitz@umich.edu (copy Dawn Harris, dmharris@umich.edu)

Include an EPA Submission Coversheet indicating which competencies you are requesting credit for.

MHPE Learners submit EPAs to the Assessment Committee demonstrating evidence of competence. Evidence submitted is expected to be diverse and unique for each learner. Learners may provide any type of evidence that demonstrates competence for an EPA provided it could be included in a tenure portfolio (e.g., articles, abstracts, recordings, talks, course materials, etc). The total submission must be concise and include a summary.

For example, when submitting published articles, the learner should:

• 1. Submit the fewest number of articles to demonstrate competency;

  2. Each article needs to be accompanied by a summary statement or talking points. This would be similar to the “bibliographic notes“ in a promotions package;

  3. A single page document that explains why the learner submitted the article(s) as evidence for an EPA:

     • Why they selected the paper;

     • What competency(s) it addresses;

     • Any unique aspects and;

     • The learner’s contribution to the paper.

Submission Timeline

Submissions are emailed to the Assessment Chair, Tom Fitzgerald at tfitz@umich.edu. The Assessment Chair will reply to the email indicting the submission was received and the anticipated assessment date (generally two weeks from submission). The Assessment Committee meets every first and third Tuesday of each month. The Assessment Chair may schedule the review further out if the schedule for the next meeting is full.

Feedback

A summary of all the reviewer comments will be sent to the learner and their mentor within two weeks of the assessment date. If you do not receive feedback after two weeks, contact Tom Fitzgerald to check the status. All submissions will receive formative feedback. If the learner's submission demonstrated competence, no additional action is needed. However, it is not unusual for the reviewers to request additional information from a learner before "passing" all the competencies in EPA.

Interpreting Feedback

• • The Assessment Committee will make a summative judgment on whether you have demonstrated the required level of performance in each of the competencies you request for an EPA. You will need to be judged “competent” in all of the competencies you request (core and optional) before you can complete the EPA and receive the competency credits.

  • Your first EPA submission may come back to you with a request to provide additional information to help reviewers make a judgement of competence. The assessment process is a key part of the learning process and the feedback from the Assessment Committee is intended not to judge YOU, but to enable you to improve, learn, and develop a better EPA. Feedback like this is rare and valuable – please take it in the supportive spirit it is intended.

  • The formative feedback reflects the expertise of members of the Assessment Committee and their interpretation of your writing. It is an amalgamation of the individual judgments into a single document. Different judges have different areas of expertise, different expectations, and different priorities. It is possible that the narrative comments will sometimes sound inconsistent with other comments (this also happens with reviewer comments for peer reviewed manuscripts submitted for publication). Do not interpret inconsistencies as errors, but instead, as different viewpoints.

  • If you do not understand the feedback or the request for additional information, contact Tom Fitzgerald (tfitz@umich.edu), Assessment Committee Chair, for clarification.