Quick Start Guide for 1 on 1 Mentors and Reviewers

Quick Reference Guide: By-Appointment Mentor & Reviewer

How do I get set up?

1. Create a Calendly and set up your availability using these instructions.
2. Mary Alice will send you a personal dashboard with your assigned students and links to their submitted assignments to review. Introduce yourself to these students through Slack!

What should I be doing each week?

Your goal is to connect at least once with each of your assigned students each week. This can be through an assignment review, Calendly 1:1 meeting, or a Slack conversation.

1. Review student assignments using the rubric in the GitHub guidebook. See below for some tips on reviewing student assignments. Try to review an assignment within a week of its submission.
2. Meet 1:1 with students who schedule a meeting. See below for a sample outline of a 1:1 session.
3. Feel free to check in with students via Slack regularly, especially if you haven’t heard from them in a while. This can help build relationships and let students know you are invested in their success.

Assignment Review

Start by reviewing these instructions for completing assignment review. Intro students don’t learn GitHub for several weeks, so their early lessons are submitted through Replit.

Tips for successful assignment review

1. Base your feedback on the learning objectives for the class. Feel free to suggest syntax improvements or best practices, but focus on whether the student met the learning objective.
2. Provide feedback on strengths and areas of improvement. Instead of just listing areas to fix, tell students what you like!
3. Use tools like ChatGPT to help quickly write feedback for students (obviously, these tools aren’t perfect, but use what you can to speed up the process!).
4. Slack the feedback to students to spark a conversation. Suggest a 1:1 meeting with students if it’s clear that they need additional help. If you have a busy week and might get behind on assignment review, please tell your students and the CIL for your class! Students are very understanding, but like knowing when to expect an assignment review update. CILs can help either organize a temporary shuffle of reviews or help out in a pinch.

1:1 Mentor Sessions

Check out CTD’s norms for communicating with students, and reach out to Reid if you ever have an interaction with a student that makes you feel uncomfortable.

Sample Mentor Session Outline

1. Check in personally with the student. What’s going on in their life? How are they feeling about the class?
2. Try to assess the student’s level of understanding of this week’s material. a. Ask students how much they have completed of (1) the online learning materials and (2) the assignment. b. Use the learning objectives to determine how close the student is to understanding the week’s material.
3. Address specific questions from the student. Remember to let the student lead the thinking here, even if they are reluctant to do so.
4. Help the student set a specific goal about when they will work on this week’s assignment and when they expect to turn it in.
5. Complete the Mentor Session Report Form and let the CILs or CTD staff know if there are any areas your or the student need additional support.