Why Mentor?

Mentoring is different from “classic” education.   When we talk about mentoring we’re in a position where we take someone who lacks a specific skillset or knowledge set, and helping them develop those skills.   While education does this as well in many instances, the nature of the relationship is somewhat different.   For example, mentoring typically has a less structured format.

In addition, the end result we’re expecting out of the mentoring process is somewhat different.   As I considered mentoring, we need to realize that the goal of the mentoring process is not to create a carbon copy of ourselves, our workflow, and our process.   A good mentoring process should allow the individual being mentored to develop the skills, processes and workflow that meet their needs and personality.   Many times after a mentoring process has concluded the person being mentored may have a drastically different approach to the subject matter.

I’m reminded of my undergraduate education, where when one proceeded through a specific major, my advisor became less and less my teacher, and more and more my mentor, and ultimately a colleague.   When I completed my undergraduate education he and I had drastically differing conclusions about the subject, however the underlying knowledge, and methods of analysis had the same grounding.

So if we enter into a mentor/mentee situation we need to be aware that the purpose of the process is not to carbon copy ourselves, but to help the person through developing their own processes.

The Process

Once we’ve clearly defined our objectives, we need to establish a process.   I’ve found that a repeated “three step” process that is cyclical in nature is effective:

1. Provide a task for the person to complete, with basic guidance.
2. Allow the person to complete the task.
3. Review their work.

Providing a task to complete

The first thing we do in the process of a mentor/mentee relationship is to provide a task, with basic guidance to complete.  For example, lets take a new sales person that’s come into our office, and we want them to create an email introducing themselves and our products to a potential customer.   We tell them what the task is, and provide them a few examples which they can build on, and other resources as appropriate (maybe we have a style guide, or something else which could be helpful).   We set a deadline for when we expect this email to be ready for review.  Deadlines don’t always have to be set in stone, but by providing guidance in terms of a deadline, we can make sure they are making progress.  We also need to tell them that if they want advice, they can always come to us.

Allowing the person to complete the task

For me, this is perhaps the hardest part of the relationship.   We need to allow the mentee to begin the process of completing the task.   As an educator, we are constantly wanting to step in, look at what the person is doing, and offer advice along the way.   While this works in a traditional educational model, in this case, we need to allow the person the opportunity explore, research, understand and develop their own workflow and style.   If they come to us for advice, we offer it, with the understanding that we’re providing guidance not direction.

Review

Sometime at the deadline the mentee should come back to us with the completed task.   When we look at this completed task, we need to make sure we look at it not from “here’s the right way to do it” but from a “does this fulfill the needs with respect to the task in a good manner.”   The mentee may have come back with something drastically different than what we expected.   However, if it fulfills the requirements of the task delineated, we need to look at it from a different angle.

When we discuss the completed task from the mentee, we also need to construct our discussion in the form of questioning, rather than direction.  Take for example this business letter.   Lets say when I write a business email, whenever I mention one of our products, I italicize the name of the product.   However, when they bring the   email to me, they haven’t italicized the names of the products, they’ve bolded them.   Lets assume there’s no style guide for how our product names are to be displayed.

Now, if I’m looking to make a carbon copy of myself I’d say “whenever we mention our products we bold the name instead of italic.”   But in a mentoring relationship, we’re better off asking a question:

I’ve noted that you italicized the product names, what was your reasoning behind italicizing the names?

Allow them to think through the process, and then communicate why.   For example they may come back and say:

Well, I wanted to use bold for important buzzwords in the email, and I wanted to distinguish these buzzwords from our product names, so I elected to use italics for our product names rather than bolding.

Now we see that we’ve not just created an environment where I’m creating a carbon copy of myself, but we’re creating an environment where they have thought about their choices.  In Dirksen’s text “Design for How People Learn” and Stolovitch and Keeps “Telling ain’t training” they talk about the layers of understanding.   I’ve modified their research to indicate there are five layers of understanding:

1. No knowledge
2. mimicry
3. repetition
4. adaptation
5. understanding

Cycling through the process

Now that we’ve established the three cycle process, which allows us to assist someone in developing a skill with a specific task in mind, we can build upon it.

The Swedish educational model of Slöjd provides an education model where by completing a series of sequentially complex tasks that build upon each other, the student (now mentee) can develop an understanding of the process.   This is different from the “top down” model that we see in other educational models.

So lets go back to our example.   We have a new sales rep, and our long term objective is to give them the skills necessary to close a deal.   Our first task we’ve given them is to send out an introductory email.   We could develop a series of subsequent tasks after this:

1. Performing a follow up telephone call
2. Arranging a meeting and demonstrating the product
3. Following up to see if there is interest
4. Creating a contract
5. Completing the sale
6. Delivering the product

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

- William Butler Yeats

When I considered this with respect to technical teaching, I shortened to this to “What, why, and how?”     When we develop our training, these three elements should be included.   Lets take an example using an administrative assistant.

We have an potential administrative assistant who will be typing in materials for distribution.   The nature of the materials is such that occasionally words or phrases need to be emphasized in the text.  In our word processing application words and phrases can either by bolded, underlined, or italicized.   We decide from a stylistic standpoint to use bold to emphasize words.   Our perspective administrative assistant hasn’t ever created bold text in a document.

When we approach the question of sequencing, there are two approaches we could take:

1. Tell the person that we can bold words using the word processor.
2. Explain to them why we would want to bold words.
3. Teach them how to do it.

It is not good for any man to hold a debased and inferior opinion of himself or his work, and in the field of school craft it is easy to fall into this self-deprecating habit of thought.

—Bagely, Craftsmanship in Teaching

The teacher must know what he would teach

That poses an interesting, but unique challenge when teaching in the technical industries.   While all disciplines change with time, the technical industries arguably change the most quickly.   One of the biggest complaints of people who have transitioned from operations to training is that their skills begin to get rusty.   They aren’t in the trenches on a day to day basis, so they aren’t constantly updating their skills.

This poses a challenge for the technical educator, because, when we transition from operations to training we’re now faced with keeping up our skill sets in two areas, sometimes very different from each other, than just one.  Now we not only are in a position where we need to find a path to keeping our technical skills up to date, which can be a challenge, but we also have to keep our educational skills up to date as well.   And while educational skills don’t age as quickly as technical ones, we need to be constantly looking for ways to improve our educational skills.

The result is, to be a good technical educator, we need to be as much a seeker of knowledge as a distributor.    Sometimes this is forgotten.   We gain a set of knowledge, we teach it, and we ignore development of that skill.   But it is imperative to constantly looking for new information about the subject.  Without being in an operational environment, this can be difficult.     We as educators must constantly be absorbing new knowledge.¹

So as a technical educator, how do we keep our technical skills current?  First, and perhaps foremost, is to learn from our students.   We must ask them the technical challenges they face, and how they have overcome them.    We can share the solution to these challenges (if appropriate) with other students.   We can also retain that information on our own.

When we aren’t in the classroom, we read, we talk to other people, we experiment, we explore those little corners of technical knowledge that we didn’t bother to when we first prepared for a course, because it didn’t seem relevant.   In fact, exploring those corners may never come up in class.   But having that knowledge makes us more confident about understanding and knowing the topic as a whole.

We must also ask ourselves how to improve our educational skills?   Clearly repetition and self analysis of how we can improve our classes is the first step.   However, we can also look at other effective, or not so effective educators, and learn from their example.   We can also study about a variety of teaching techniques, regardless of how obscure.   For example, I’d read most of the modern literature on effective teaching techniques, or at least so many that they were becoming repetitive.   I stretched back to texts from the 19th century, particularly those released by religious institutions about teaching.   As I read them, I realized some of what they said was irrelevant to my particular corner of the profession, however, I’d occasionally stumble upon discussion that gave me a new perspective on how to teach well.   Many times, particularly in the technical industries, we’re focused on the current, and we must remember that when it comes to educational techniques, we have centuries (dating all the way back to Socrates) of knowledge that we can absorb and adapt to our modern environment.

When will men who would never for a moment, encourage their sons to enter the work of the public schools, cease to cease to tell us that education is the greatest and highest of callings? Education does not need these compliments.

–William Chandler Bagley, Craftsmanship in Teaching

But the cynic forgets that there are some people that never lose their illusions, some men and women who are always young, and whatever may be the type of men and women that other callings and professions desire to enroll in their service, this is the type that education needs.

–William Chandler Bagely, “Craftsmanship in teaching”

In John M Gregory’s the seven laws of teaching he addresses this issue.   The third law, the law of language, asserts that:

The language used in teaching must be common to the teacher and the learner.

This gives us a starting point of reference, as instructors, we need to make sure that in whatever we teach, our choice of language and materials is consistent with the current understanding of the student.   In Bennion’s text, The Principles of Teaching, he takes it one step further:

A subject, to be interesting must present some element of newness, yet must be so linked up with the experience of the learner as to be made comprehensible.  It must, moreover, be made to appeal as essential and helpful in the life of the learner.

So, as we’re developing course materials, and presenting them, we need to have three factors in mind.  First we need to make sure any material we present uses languages and concepts that are meaningful two the learner.  Second, our materials should build up on the current experience of the learner, so we can expand their language.  Finally the materials and presentation should be shown in a light that it is useful for the person learning.

Lets take an example of how this would work.   Let’s say we’ve developed a new web site, and a user of the web site needs to go to the site, and sign up for account.  How would we handle the teaching of this process for both Instructor Led Training and also Self Directed video based training?

Instructor Led Training

First, we need to assess the current expertise level of our students.   Are they experienced net-saavy users that have gone through similar processes before?   Or maybe they’ve never used a web browser before, let alone signed into a web site.   Sometimes we don’t have the answer to this question before we develop the materials, so we have to assess that in class.   Other times we know who our target audience is and can make a judgement pre-class in our development materials.

If we know we are going have experienced users in our class, we can limit ourselves to one slide, and a quick discussion saying you need to go to the site and sign up.

If we know we are going to have inexperienced users in our class, we want to take them step by step, probably showing screen shots, and telling them what needs to be placed in each box on the web page.

If we don’t know, we’re going to want to develop materials that takes our student step by step through the process, showing each screen, and what needs to be put in each screen.  The teacher will need to assess the skill level of the students and if they are more experienced, quickly skip through the slides.

This places us in a position where we can resolve all three conditions with one set of materials.

The next issue we need to make sure our course ties students prior knowledge to the knowledge we are giving them.   In the first case, that of experienced users, we can simply state that this is similar to signing up for any other web site.   For our inexperienced users, we might want to tie filling out this form like filling out an application for a new rental card at our local video store, or maybe like filling out an application for a library card.

Here since we’ve got such drastic differences of experience, we probably can’t include pre-generated materials, i.e. slides, to reflect both these models.  It’s going to be up to the instructor to give a description consistent with the experience of the students.

Finally, we need to make sure we keep attention of the students.   Here we can point out this account that you sign into is going to be your personal account, and if you don’t pick a reasonably complex password, someone may be able to break into their account, and cause “problems” including stealing your identity with respect to that specific web site.   This gives the student the “push” to let them know that this information is important in their lives, as it protects their identity.

Self Directed Video Based Training

With self directed video based training, there’s a challenge.   It’s not practical to develop two videos, one for the experienced user, and one for the novice.   So we need to do a serious assessment of who our potential target audience is.   We need to take into consideration all the potential people that are likely to view this material, and ultimately design it for the lowest level of experience.   While this may frustrate the more experienced user, the worst that it will do is frustrate them.   If we elevate our language to high, and gloss over items considering them “obvious” when it isn’t to a portion of our audience, they end up not being able to understand our instruction.  Given the choice of either annoying a student (who given proper development can simply skip through that section of the presentation) or having a student that doesn’t understand the material, we have to err on the side of less complex language in order to make sure they understand.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that all course materials need to be designed for someone who has no technical skills.   But we need to make sure that the language and materials are consistent with the lowest level of technical understanding of the group of people that are going to view the material.

So, if we are talking about a service that is available to the “public at large” we need to lower my level of technical jargon, and do more hand holding.   On the other hand, if we are generating materials that are only going to be viewed for people at the top end of the technical spectrum, we can make some presumptions about their level of knowledge.

So we have solutions for both the instructor led training environment, and the self directed video based environment.   The former requires a skilled instructor who can assess the knowledge level of the student, the latter requires a solid understanding of our potential student base, and what the bottom level of knowledge is of that base.

1. The teacher must know that which he would teach.   And in a true teacher, a teacher must teach that which they know.
2. The learner must attend with interest the fact or truth to be learned.  Without the attention of the student, nothing can be learned.
3. The language used in teaching must be common to the teacher and the learner.
4. The truth to be taught must be learned through the truth already known.   A student can only learn based upon what they already know.
5. Excite and direct the  self-activities of the learner, and tell him nothing he can learn himself.
6. The learner must reproduce in his own mind the truth to be acquired.
7. The completion, test, and confirmation of teaching must be made by reviews.

However, when we transition from the static course materials to teaching them, the instructor needs to develop a style, or method, of taking the course materials and lecturing on them.   In Bennion’s “Principles of Teaching” he actually addresses this question.   I hadn’t read such a good analysis of this process.   He indicates there are several different methods of delivery:

1. Tell a story
2. Reading Round
3. Special Topic
4. Lecture
5. Discussion

Some of these methods are applicable in today’s modern classroom, and others are not as good a match.

We can take a given lesson and elect to tell a story.   While Bennion says this is a good method for children I’d argue that in a work environment, it’s applicable as well, and can serve well to reinforce concepts.   For example, lets say we’re doing a lesson about preparing a press release.   We start by saying “Let me tell you a story about Tom, the admin assistant who was asked to prepare a press release, and had never done it before.”   We can go through his process of asking questions, looking at examples to determine how a good press release is structured.   The student, by following Tom’s story, can follow the relevant sections of learning, while we choose not to include the section of Tom’s story that lead him down the wrong path.

However, the trick to telling a story is to keep it brief, and to the point.   This is where we need to stay focused on what topic we’re teaching when we talk about this story.

Reading round is a very old concept that comes out of the 19th century.   You pass a book around from student to student, and each person reads a segment.   This model, as developed, ultimately ended up being pretty disastrous from a teaching model, as students really only retained the sections they themselves read.

However, we can use Reading Round for a different approach.  We can go around the classroom  and ask students what their experiences are with a given topic,  what challenges they have faced, and how they have dealt with them.   The instructor can comment in between each story, giving advice where appropriate.

The Special Topic method applies when we have material that doesn’t weave well in with the other material, but its critical that it be covered.   In longer classes it can be extended even further so a student is handed a special topic, and is asked to talk on it.   I’ve encountered this several times in my past, once in a mathematics class when I was in junior high, and once in a class at a Law School.   While the concept of special topics allows for in depth coverage of material, the problem is that it poses a problem with cohesion for the entire material covered in the course.

However, it does have the effect of engaging the students more than a standard lecture, and it also fosters individual expression.

The trick may be to use Special Topics sparingly, and only when it either involves material that doesn’t fit well within the course material, or alternatively, having the student research the topic provides enhanced learning.

The  Lecture method is what most instructors are used to, particularly in the technical field, an instructor gets up, and talks for 45-60 minutes on a topic.   I see this as typical undergraduate school education, particularly in the early years.  Lecturing allows the educator to make sure that the appropriate information is getting to the student.   However, what it lacks if used without other approaches, is feedback from the student.   Are they understanding what is being taught?   Have they formed some opinions about what the educator is talking about?

For example, when I am teaching about vulnerability scanning I advise students that they should be doing topology scans twice a day, vulnerability scans one a day, and compliance scans once a month.  (don’t worry if you don’t know what these are).   I have no real measure to know whether when the student goes home, whether they are likely to follow my advice.     So, the lecture method is terrific at getting out basic information, but when it comes to taking that information and applying it, the lecture method becomes less useful.

The Discussion (i.e. Socratic) method of instruction is commonly used in law schools.   This is where the educator poses a series of questions to the students, and has them respond.  The process of answering the question and exploring the possibilities allows them to learn.   In many ways, this method is the best method to reinforce a topic.   However, its not appropriate in many circumstances.   For example, if we’re talking about the navigation bar in a piece of software, and its components, its a little silly to ask a series of questions.  Though you could.   For example I could say “Where do you think you’d find the ability to print out a report?”   We could ask each student where they think it would be, and ultimately come up with the right answer.   However, it would be an extremely slow process, and might not be the best way to spend the student’s valuable time.

Ultimately, the trick to taking course materials and transitioning them to teaching is to mix and match styles, based upon the topic, the students, finding the best method for the given situation.