No abstract

MentorNet (www.MentorNet.net), a nonprofit organization founded in 1997 as an online network for women in engineering and science, developed a large-scale one-on-one mentoring program, which has served tens of thousands of participants over the years of its operation. As participation grew, the increasing numbers of participants who selfidentified as people of color eventually provided a large enough dataset to analyze the program by race/ethnicity. This study seeks to shed light on the experiences of women of color, as programs designed to benefit the majority population may not serve all participants equally well. We also know that the group of professionals volunteering as mentors was not as diverse as the group of students seeking mentoring.Program evaluations based on responses to end-of-relationship surveys, taken together with data collected when participants first applied for the program, reveal that many students of color are particularly interested in discussing issues of race with a mentor. Even in cases where students initially expressed a preference to be matched with a mentor of the same race, however, their satisfaction at the end of a mentoring relationship was no less if they had been matched with a person of a different race. Students of color were more likely than White students to attribute their retention in college and increased motivation to succeed in their chosen fields to having an external mentor. Professionals participating as mentors who were people of color reported increased self-confidence from the experience, more so than did White mentors.

Serious deficits in health care education have been identified recently, yet proposed solutions call for faculty skill sets not typically developed in health professional schools or in continuing professional development (CPD) programs. The authors propose that addressing the oft-cited problems in health care education (e.g., it is not learner-centered and does not take advantage of insights gained from the learning sciences) requires faculty to develop "innovator's skills" including the ability to facilitate organizational change. Given increased social responsibilities and decreased financial resources, it is imperative that more health care educators and health care delivery system leaders not only become innovators themselves but also develop systems that support the next generation of innovators. Dyer et al conducted a comprehensive study of successful innovators and found five behavioral and cognitive "discovery" skill sets that constitute the "innovator's DNA": associating, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting. This article uses the prism of innovator's DNA to examine a CPD program for health care educators, the Harvard Macy Institute (HMI), whose overarching purpose is to develop innovation skills in participants so that they can build their own educational models customized for implementing changes in their home institutions. A retrospective review of HMI alumni from 1995 to 2010 suggests that innovator skills can be taught and applied. The conceptual framework of the innovator's DNA provides a useful model for other CPD program leaders seeking to enable health care educators to develop the capacity for successfully examining problems and then customizing and implementing organizational change to solve them.