Editing Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2014)/Reflections (section)

=== Mentorship ===

Last time through, most of our observation were focused on improving the experience of attendees and we think we didn't spend as much time on helping mentors have a great experience and helping them prepare effectively. We had many new mentors this round. One general concern was the relative lack of mentor training, especially before the first sessions. We had a series of pieces of feedback on how to improve this.

* Arrange a pre-CDSW mentors meeting (perhaps a day or two before to over material) and maybe at a bar or other social environment with beer and pizza. We could use this to set norms, best practices, goals, planning, etc.
* Perhaps meet 15-20 minutes early before Session 0 to get to know each other and over things.
* Create some easier way to distinguish mentors from students (e.g., t-shirts, buttons, paper them head to foot in sticky notes).
* Send out detailed instructions and emails to mentors, or create pages in this wiki, that detail good mentoring. For example:
** How much should you help? Some. But be careful not to just give away the answer, to focus too much on elegance or technical correctness. Be careful not to overwhelm the learners.
** Explicitly encourage mentors to reach out to students and ask them how things are going by walking around to every single person to ask, “How are you doing? What are you working on? Show me what you’re doing.”