In the Back-End Engineering program at Turing School of Software & Design, we've been using a student-developed tool called Paired to facilitate one-off tutoring sessions between upper-module (i.e., students farther along in the program) and lower-module students. This has been a great resource, and has been embraced by the back-end program (to the extent that it appears on the front page of the curriculum). We also have access to a wide pool of mentors, made up of alumni and other developers in the Denver area, who volunteer to be paired with Turing students and available for several hours a week to mentees.
Our observation while using these resources was that there's room for an additional resource between one-off peer tutoring and ongoing alumni mentoring: peer mentoring, longer-term mentoring relationships between upper-mod students and lower-mod students. In these relationships a peer mentor (or "rock") and mentee (or "pebble") can get to know one another's learning styles and challenges, establish a relationship of support, and have a relational bridge into one another's cohorts; goals that are difficult to accomplish in one-off Paired sessions.
In practice, this could be as simple as having an agreement to schedule a Paired session once a week and being available for an agreed-upon amount of time per week via Slack to answer questions. Each "rock-and-pebble" pair would start off by having a DTR to define goals, expectations, and availability in the same way students are encouraged to do with their alumni mentors. Also like the mentoring program, the pair would re-define their relationship at the end of an inning (i.e., six weeks) and decide whether to keep it going into the next inning or not. A rock/pebble pair might part ways and be paired with other students after an inning, or it might last for several innings; it's up to them.
Just to be super-clear, this does not replace the existing mentoring system. To make sure that we're taking advantage of that incredible resource, we'll ask that you be actively meeting with an alumni mentor before getting paired with a peer mentor.
The benefits of being mentored by a peer farther along in the program are fairly obvious. But the potential benefits to mentors are just as good, if not better!
One of the best ways to learn something is to teach. Peer mentors will have an opportunity to refresh their understanding of previous modules' content, establish skills more firmly through repetition, and make connections to more recent content that might not have been clear at the time. Being able to scan and understand another developers' code is a critical skill unto itself, and can help mentors expand their imaginations for the different ways a problem can be solved. And by devloping their skill at mentoring, mentors develop a skill relevant to the workplace and not just an educational environment.
One of our hopes for peer mentoring at Turing is that, like Paired, this can be a model that can be replicated and thus outlive our short stay as students. As students in the 1909, 1908, and 1911 Back-End cohorts, we've already been doing this informally and finding it to be beneficial. In the initial stages we'll be manually connecting peer mentors with mentees, but--being what we are--we would love to build an app to do the work for us. We hope to develop this by the time the 1909 cohort graduates in late April 2020, perhaps as one of our Mod 4 projects and perhaps in collaboration with our front-end friends. If you're interested, DM Daniel Frampton (@danielframpton) in Turing's Slack workspace.
For now, until that long-term plan comes to fruition, if you're interested in either being a peer mentor "rock" or a peer mentee "pebble," just send a DM to Daniel Frampton (@danielframpton) in Turing's Slack workspace. Until we have a system in place, he'll act as a clearing-house to connect you with somebody and make an initial introduction.
Thank you for reading, and for your interest!