How a faculty group's peer mentoring of each other's scholarship can enhance retention and recruitment

At a time when schools of nursing seek to retain and recruit faculty ready to meet promotion and tenure requirements, many faculty are less than able to fulfill scholarly expectations. As senior scholars begin to retire, today's faculty groups are a mix of master's-prepared clinicians and recent graduates with professional (doctor of nursing practice) or research doctorates. This means that novice and midcareer faculty often lack the educational preparation for and/or a proper introduction into the scholarly role. A transition that can take 5 years or more, internalizing a scholarly identity is a process that unfolds over time in the course of presenting, publishing, and conducting research with the support of scholarly colleagues. With an eye toward easing this developmental/relational transition, chairs and deans search for professional development approaches to meet the diverse scholarly learning needs of a mixed faculty group. Given a dearth of scholar-mentors, professional development approaches that engage faculty groups in making scholarship a cooperative venture and a collective responsibility are appealing. This article explores whether a project that systematically prepared a faculty group to peer-mentor each other's scholarly success from hire to retire holds promise for fostering academic workplaces productive and pleasurable enough to attract and retain the best and the brightest.