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Event Mentor Best Practices

trosetty edited this page May 17, 2015 · 7 revisions

For the long-game, encourage people to become mentors or help people find one over in Node Forward Mentors.

General Guidelines

  • Ratios: Try and get a mentor:student ratio of around 1:5 or more

Finding Good Mentors

Guiding Mentors to be More Awesome

  • Hovering: Mentors float around the event asking attendees if they are stuck, or if the attendees are too scared to ask for help then the mentors would try to peak over their shoulders and give them unsolicited advice.
  • Troubleshooting: From linclark: When someone asks me what the problem is with their failing solution, even if I see the bug immediately I don't say that I do. Instead, I'll say "hmm, I'm not sure, let's take a look" and ask them to do the debugging steps that I would do if I ran into a bug that I didn't understand ("Can you put a console.log() statement and log out the foo variable", etc). This does two things: 1. It makes the learner feel less incompetent and more like we're in this together because we both don't know what's going on, and 2. it gives them the skills to find their own bugs when there aren't mentors around.

Keeping Mentors Engaged

More Resources