The immediate past Dean, College of Physical Sciences (COLPHYS) FUNAAB, Professor Amidu Mustapha has stressed the need for mentoring, in order to ensure efficiency and productivity of mentees.
He stated this at the Retreat held for academic staff of the College.
The Don said that mentoring is a relationship designed to build confidence between two people, an offline help by one person (Mentor) to another (Mentee) in making significant transactions in knowledge, work or thinking.
Professor Mustapha said that a mentor is seen as an experienced and trusted person who must possess skills such as, self awareness; credibility; good communication skills; organisational know-how; accessibility; ability to empower; desire to help others develop; inventiveness, empathy and understanding.
He highlighted the stages of mentorship to include the induction/starting point stage when a mentee is working towards promoting and changing role across the institution among other likely avenues that may present itself for mentoring.
The Don noted that mentoring has its own benefits, which according to him, include but not limited to, job satisfaction from seeing others develop; increased recognition from peers; challenge and stimulation and having the ability to identify future potentials of the person being mentored.
He however advised mentors to listen more to their mentees and be firm on their needs, but never assume that what worked for them (mentors) would work for the mentees.
In other presentations, the Director, Information and Communication Technology Resource Centre (ICTREC), Professor Adesina Agboola and Professor Olusegun Folorunso spoke on the topic “e-Content for Teaching” and “e-Content for Learning” respectively.
According to Professor Agboola, “Learning process has been influenced by the expansion and evolution of Computers, network and multimedia technology”, noting that the main aim of developing e-Content is to achieve specific goals in education, and place the learner’s need at the centre of the learning process.
Similarly, Professor Folorunsho advocated for the use of more Audio Visual Files, Words Documents, Video Files and Synchronized Presentation for the purpose of learning.
Earlier, welcoming the participants, the Dean, COLPHYS, Professor Adio Akinwale said that the purpose of the Retreat is to enable the academic staff in the College to know their rights, work together, reason and do the right thing when necessary.
He noted that all Speakers were sourced in-house, and carefully selected to fit into the required needs of staff for the purpose of the Retreat.
Other Speakers at the Retreat were; Professor James Oguntuase, who spoke on the topic, “Known Rules and Regulations in Relationship with Academic”; Professor Olukayode Akinyemi, “Duties of Academic Staff in Relation with HOD and their Primary Assignments” and Professor Adetokunbo Taiwo, “Getting International Grants” among others.
