I was wondering if everyone utilises their mentors and how you keep them in the loop?
Generally our sessions are quite small and in the beginning we would have 5 mentors and 2 students so we didn’t really engage them or point them out too much.
Yesterday though, was very different. I tried to point the mentors out but they were reluctant.
Do you find mentors are reluctant to mentor? How do you manage this?
We’ve tried a few things at London. I used to have all the mentors stand up and join us at the front and then get the students to come to the mentors and form groups. However, one mentor called it the ‘Wall of shame’ and likened it to being picked for the football team, which is fair. It’s an aggressive approach.
Another thing that Simon Tomes, who helps facilitate the sessions, was doing when I was at SWTC London was to speak to the mentors before the session started. He’d say hello, ask if they had seen the lesson plan and generally find out if there was anything they needed. Which I think helped make them more comfortable.
I think there is definitely more we can do though. We offer a lot of support for the students but it’s harder with Mentors. There is a different type of imposter syndrome to cut through, and whilst letting them switch between student and mentor definitely helps. I would like for us to do more work about how we can improve support for mentors.
Other minor things I have suggested that we are implementing is different name badges for mentors and students to make it clearer who is mentoring without dragging them in front of the class 
Interesting, regarding the lesson plans. In the beginning we shared them, however recently we are prepping the lesson plan the night before, due to life and other commitments which has meant we didn’t have one to share early on.
Maybe just having print outs could help. We do have half hour before we start that we set up and mingle with people. May be able to use that time a bit better.
We also had some problems with things like “the 15 second rule”, where we’d ask the mentors to essentially keep quiet and let students speak first.
That caused some mentors to disengage, or sign up as students as they wanted to be involved in the convs, and they definitely should be involved in the convs!
So we did away with that, and changed our language to tell the mentors to get involved in sharing their stories, but don’t dominate the conversations.
That has been working well!
Also, I think it’s fine for the mentors to relay back info from a debrief too.
That is a good time to catch up with Mentors. However, I know it can be tricky doing setup and speaking to mentors at the same time. Maybe give it a trial on the Automation session since Technical testing works in a very different way. Let us know how you get on.
Every city should have someone doing the role that Simon Tomes does for London. He does an awesome job with the mentors, keeping us on time, and on social media during the session. He also records video bites of the hosts during the session too, which gets good traction on twitter.
But the stuff he does for the mentors is really useful. It makes them extra comfortable on the night, and he’s there to float and help if we need him to too.
We share the lesson plans before (we aim to do it the weekend before). Then we have printouts on the day, and check back with each mentor that they are a) happy to mentor, b) have a lesson plan. That usually works well.
Recently we are running short on mentor numbers, which has me a bit worried … So far it always worked out, but we might need to reach out to a few people in the future to ask or encourage
We never really had a problem. It had nearly a problem this time with mentors but two more turned up I hadn’t counted. I tend to just check in if a group is struggling and try to help them and then see if they get on afterwards.
Today we had Dan B help as a almost teaching Assistent which helped a lot. So like Simon has done in London.