You’re Invited! Mentoring Meetup November 8th

As we approach the holiday season, I am reflecting on the year and what has given me joy. One thing I am truly grateful for is our Instructor Development Committee. Toby Hodges, the committee’s co-chair, has done a phenomenal job in his term thus far pushing us to think broadly about ways to engage and support our growing instructor pool. I’m grateful for you Toby!

In this State of Instructor Development slide deck, you’ll notice something else I’m grateful for: The Carpentries Mentoring Groups. Mentoring groups have been supporting each other since 5 September in several areas. A few of the groups’ activities include:

• Contributing to lessons
• Developing teaching skills for Python
• Mock teaching sessions to prepare to teach a workshop
• Learning to confidently use GitHub to set up event pages and personalised lesson plans
• Starting a study group around Data Carpentry lessons
• Using a practice repo to teach/practice various GitHub workflows
• Using GitHub to create a custom lesson for an upcoming workshop

The progress our mentoring groups have made gives me great joy, and I want to share it with you, our community. I invite each of you to join us for our last mentoring meetup of the year.

Our goal for this mentoring meetup/virtual showcase is to show the community how mentoring can benefit both the mentors and the mentees. We want you to see what meaningful and impactful work is being done, and to challenge you to get involved.

We will hold two events to accommodate multiple time zones as follows:

Showcase #1
Thursday, November 8th at 14:00 UTC

Showcase #2
Thursday, November 8th at 23:00 UTC

Planning on attending? Let us know you’re coming by signing up on this Etherpad.

Mentoring groups are a part of the Instructor Development Committee. Each cycle of mentoring ends with a survey, and the results of that survey help improve the program. This cycle we improved mentor and mentee matching making it easier for mentors to schedule meetings with their mentees so that they could get to work faster and not spend so much time trying to find a time to meet.

We want to continually improve our mentoring opportunities, but we can only do that with feedback from you. Find more information on mentoring in our handbook, and see you at the showcase!