Mentors are important to a Technovation Girls participant's learning and support throughout the program
Mentors work with teams for the duration of the season to:
- help the team stay on track
- manage time and meet deadlines
- navigate team dynamics, including promoting effective communication
- connect teams to additional resources
- encourage enthusiasm and engagement throughout the program
- enable the teams to be creative and independent problem solvers
Meet Britta, a Shopify iOS Developer & Technovation mentor who grew up liking science but didn’t pursue it till her 2nd degree!
TASKS AS A MENTOR
There is an assortment of tasks that make up the Mentor role, that list of tasks depends on your team’s needs and desired outcomes for the season.
Below are 8 tasks that Mentors typically complete in the Technovation Girls program. Hover over each card to flip it and get an idea of how you can build or implement that skill.
Reflection
Think about how you, as a Mentor, want to work with your team.
Am I reaching my team? Are they engaged with me? Can I learn more about what motivates them to better guide them as their Mentor?
Team Building
Promote teamwork and strengthen effective co-operation.
Start each meeting with an icebreaker to help the team settle in and build rapport. Model positive interactions with all team members to show the girls how to communicate.
Empowerment
Encourage self-organization and promote self-confidence of your team. Celebrate all their wins, big or small!
Celebrate all their wins!
The primary goal is learning! If they have learned something new or built a new skill, make sure you and the rest of the team acknowledge that.
Build Transferrable Skills
Share attitudes and values, such as a growth mindset and unconscious bias, with your team. Students will carry these with them beyond Technovation.
Giving your team the answer to a question, helps them in the moment. Showing your team how to find the answer, helps them for a lifetime (and it means you don't have to be an expert in the topic, just willing to find the answer with them).
Hold Space
Create a positive learning environment that allows each student to grow their unique skill set.
Check out the Culturally-Responsive Sustaining Practice at the end of this lesson for more on this!
Expectation Management
Support the team identify and reconcile different expectations about their project.
Be proactive
In your first team meeting, take time to go through the team agreement to set expectations for the season.
Conflict Management
Encourage open and respectful communication in times of conflict. Support the team in finding a solution.
Refer back to your team agreement to help the team find common ground. Remain neutral and make sure all sides are heard. Acting as a mediator who guide towards compromise and understanding.
Forward Thinking
Keep a bird’s eye view of the team’s work and encourage them to progress forward.
Be aware of upcoming milestones and help your team make good decisions in a timely manner.
GROW WITH THE STUDENTS
A benefit of being a mentor is that you get to expand your knowledge and skills alongside the team. Many mentors report feeling re-energized about their work. Getting to work with this generation of changemakers gives you insight into what is important to them, how they perceive and interact with their communities, and how they tackle challenges.
IMPROVED WORK
of mentors reported that the skills they improved are skills they use in their role at work
LEADERSHIP SKILLS
of mentors said this experience improved their leadership skills
TEAM BUILDING
of mentors reported that this experience helped them gain team building skills
BUILDING A SENSE OF BELONGING
The most integral part of your role as a Mentor is helping participants build their sense of belonging. As girls progress in the program, we hope they will feel that they belong in STEM, business, and many other spaces where their voice is so important.
As their Mentor, ensure they are heard and feel valued for what they bring to the experience and what they learn from it. This includes providing guidance and answers to questions that allow them to explore and find the answer on their own, not just giving it to them.
Part of this process is to practice culturally responsive-sustaining engagement with your team.
CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE-SUSTAINING PRACTICE
Generally, when we look to broaden participation in technology, this means increasing access. Increased access alone is not enough, we need a multi-pronged approach where students can explore their cultures, experiences, and interests with the new lens of technology. This is a step in closing racial, gender, and socioeconomic equity gaps.
This framework from the Kapor Centre in the United States, looks holistically at what changes need to occur in educational practices and legislation to improve the learning experience. The framework focuses on computer science, but many of the learnings can be extrapolated to the Technovation Girls program.
We’ve pulled out some key courses of action, that you as a Mentor may implement while working with your teams; and have modified some of the language slightly to better fit this context. We acknowledge that equity work looks different in each community, so take what you need.
Click through the titles on the left side to reveal more information.
As a mentor, it’s important to explore your own identities and your position of privilege and power. This includes among many others:
- racial identity
- gender identity
- cultural identity
- ethnic identity
- linguistic identity
- religious identity
- socioeconomic status
- and more
You don’t need to share this with your team, this is to help you understand your perspectives. Taking time to understand who you are walking into this experience, will help you better understand who you will be as a Mentor and how you can connect with your team with minimal bias.
Part of building that sense of belonging in STEM, begins with making spaces, like Technovation, feel safe for participants. This content may be new to many girls, they should be free to learn and make mistakes that they can grow from. Below are some first steps you can take:
- deliberately establish an accessible team dynamic that recognizes, respects, and includes the voices, ideas, needs, and perspectives of all students by consistently checking-in with the team and getting their feedback on how the team is working together
- incorporate girl’s voices and perspectives throughout the program engaging them as cultural experts, make sure they feel heard
- actively and intentionally confront and dispel stereotypes and biases about the abilities and skills of students from marginalized groups. Remind them that learning is a journey and technology is for everyone, including them!
- honor and respect the diverse ways that students process and learn information, striving to be mindful and inclusive in their engagement. If one girl needs a little more time to grasp a concept give her that time; help her find other videos or content that may explain the concept in a way she understands.
Have your team explore their own identity can help them find a community they want to support with their project or help them think of a problem they can tackle. In the ideation content, there is a lesson about communities. This lesson is a great vessel to getting teams to explore and think about their identities.
- help teams explore their identities to develop tech-based solutions that reflect their passions and interests (this is why Technovation let’s teams pick the idea they want to solve)
- honor and affirm students’ intersecting identities within curriculum (ideation is a great place to do this!), instructional practices and support team’s navigation of technology and society at large
- support teams in learning about the history of their respective communities, honor their ethnicities and cultures, and incorporate their cultures, interest, and passions into the learning process
I still have a question
You can always reach out to Technovation’s Volunteer Engagement Team on Slack or at volunteers@technovation.org.
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