Mentoring is Back! Round Two of the Carpentries Mentoring Program begins October 25th

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Mentoring groups provide experienced instructors with the chance to help small groups develop confidence in teaching, lesson maintenance and community building

The inaugural Carpentries mentoring program was a great success, and we have used the feedback we received from both mentors and mentees to craft a new and improved mentoring experience in round two. The next round will run October 25th - January 10th.

According to round one participants, the benefits of mentoring included greater understanding of the challenges new instructors face, more clarity about why we teach what we teach, getting timely responses to questions, and community engagement.

Participants felt the program could be improved if mentoring groups had specific goals, and if we gave mentors more guidance on how to run mentoring sessions.

We listened to that feedback and have made changes to the program. We are now offering curriculum-specific mentoring: both mentors and mentees can choose which tools they are most interested in discussing from the following list:

• Git
• Shell
• Python
• R
• SQL

Once a topic has been selected, participants can choose what aspect of mentoring they want for their chosen tool:

• Lesson Maintenance
  • Contributing to current lesson development
  • Contributing to lesson maintenance
• Teaching Workshops
  • Developing confidence and skill in teaching
  • Preparing to teach a specific lesson (e.g., Python)

Additionally, we plan to offer mentoring on two big issues:

• Organizing Workshops
  • Logistics of organizing a workshop (e.g. marketing, registration)
  • Logistics of running a workshop (e.g. recruiting instructors, distributing tasks)
• Community Building
  • Strategies to create and build local communities
  • Tried-and-true events that help foster local community development

To help groups get organized we have provided sample mentoring program outlines to help groups use their time together productively.

Interested in mentoring? We will hold two information sessions on Thursday, October 12th at 06:00 UTC and 21:00 UTC. Sign up to attend either information session on the etherpad.

Applications for both mentors and mentees are open. The deadline to apply to participate in the program is October 18th.

Share your excitement about mentoring via Twitter (@datacarpentry @swcarpentry @drkariljordan @cloudaus) with the hashtag #carpentriesmentoring.