u/Tbh_idk______ wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Experienced engineer !== effective teacher. Conflating these two things happens often and it’s overlooked. What’s important in any learning experience is whether the trainer has both subject area competence and pedagogical expertise. Having only one is insufficient. I don’t
u/michaelnovati replied · · edited ★ FEATURED
100% agree that great engineers are not always great mentors, couldn't agree more! This is one of the reasons I personally don't do sessions, and focus on writing code, but that Daniel, Sophie, and others do sessions.
So most of our mentors are industry engineers who first go through light training (reading materials and videos) and then go through a shadowing and reverse shadowing process to be approved to run sessions.
For 1-1 mock interviews they are instructed to run them as industry mock interviews, and they complete a structured feedback form at the end with dozens of data points.
For group sessions, it's a little more complicated. We have a few dozen session types and people need to get shadowed and reverse shadowed for each type. Each session has very clear instructions on how to run that session - both technically and regarding the overall flow. Every single session technical session, Fellows are required to complete a multi data point feedback about the session and often times a reflection as well.
Weekly we collect a few dozen data points per Fellow to measure satisfaction, happiness and places for improvements that we summarize, prioritize, and action weekly.
Every Fellow can book a checkin with a Fellow Manager whenever they want, for whatever reason to discussion anything. And every Fellow has a private channel with at least 3 team members to discuss any feedback.
Fellows can block sessions with specific mentors by notifying their Fellow Managers, as some mentors have polarizing (love/hate) feedback.
Finally, Fellows can provide 100% anonymous feedback if they don't feel comfortable sharing something.
Now we collect all this feedback, tens of thousands of data points a week, and we identify areas of potential concern, like a mentor that scored very poorly in a session or a type of session, or broader feedback and then make adjustments.
Some mentors are fantastic and have a bad day at work or an emergency. Some mentors are removed. Some mentors are coached. And some mentors realize they don't want to do this kind of thing and leave.
Even though we do all of the above, I think we have underinvested in session consistency because having say 95% of sessions rated amazing isn't good enough when people are paying a lot of money for your service. We hold ourselves to a high bar, and it truly saddens our instruction engineering team if a Fellow gets too many poor sessions and we try to correct it behind the scenes.
Overall, yes, it's a challenge and we do have a handful of Formation Alumni doing certain sessions that truly benefit from that. We have a handful of more classic teachers who are not engineers for some sessions. It's a really complex thing to work on for sure and we have a lot of work to do!