Mentor Support All Season
Mentor Cohorts bring together 5-7 Mentors to stay connected all season.
Together, they can share:
- advice based on previous Technovation volunteer experience
- their expertise based on their skillset
- challenges and questions to brainstorm solutions
- celebrations for successes throughout the season
- resources and support for team meetings
Cohorts will allow new Mentors to get advice to support a smooth first season, and returning Mentors will also have the opportunity to learn, while passing on knowledge from working with teams in previous seasons.
How are Cohorts created?
Mentors are invited to fill out the Cohort form to indicate their location, skillset, and preferences for meeting.
The Volunteer Engagement Team will then put Mentors into groups every 2 weeks, connecting them via email or Slack.
Mentors will not be able to join Cohorts past 14 weeks until the submission deadline, January 27, 2025.
Cohorts will be based on the following criteria, dependant on other interested Mentors:
- Time zone, within +/- 2 hours
- Complementary areas of expertise
- Compatible methods of engagement (Slack, email, and/or virtual meetings)
- Same or neighbouring countries
Engaging with your Cohort
The Technovation Team has put together some topics that your Cohort can cover with a rough timeline (monthly). This timeline is meant to take some of the guesswork out of engaging, but your Cohort is welcome to discuss any relevant topic at any point in the season.
- Share an introduction (via Email or Slack), include your:
- Name and location
- Number of years as a mentor
- What you are looking forward to?
- What you are hesitant about as a Mentor?
- Decide with your Cohort how you would like to interact with each other
- Options include: Virtual meetings, Slack (or other messaging platform), email, a combination, or another method.
- Set communication norms so that everyone can agree to something that works for them
Sample Cohort communication expectations
Your Cohorts can look different, have a chat to figure out what will work for you and know that it can change during the season if needed!
Our Cohort will check-in once a week via Slack message. One person (rotate weekly according to a predetermined schedule) will lead for that week and pick a topic to post. Everyone else should respond in thread. If someone asks a question in the Slack channel, at least one other Mentor should answer it, even if that means tagging someone who would know the answer.
- Discuss questions you still have from completing the Mentor training
- See if a Mentor in your Cohort is not connected to a Chapter/Club and consider introducing them to your local Ambassador if they are in the same region.
- If they are not, think about if it makes sense to support you as a co-Mentor
For new members! If a new Mentor joins in this month, have them introduce themself (refer to November) and share the Cohort’s communication expectations with them!
For new Cohorts! Take a look at the tab ‘Getting Started (or November)’ to get your Cohort started for the season.
December is the final push to get ready before projects really pick up momentum in January/February. The following topics encourage you and your Cohort to get ready as Mentors and think about how you will build alignment with your teams from day 1.
- Have you completed onboarding as a Mentor?
- Completed Mentor training
- Done a background check, if required (Mentors in Canada, India, Nigeria, and the US only)
- Signed the consent waiver
- Team formation
- Discuss if Mentors have been able to find a team, share any advice
- Consider working with a Mentor in your Cohort as a co-Mentor (especially great if you have complementary skills, ie. one strong in coding paired with one strong in business)
- Team agreement (watch the walkthrough video)
- Share what the expectations you are setting for your team as their Mentor
- Discuss ideas for what you can do in your first team meeting
- Share icebreaker activities you can do with your team
- Review the optional lesson in mentor training: Prepare for your First Meeting
- Pre-built meeting agendas (Junior | Senior) – have you looked at these or are you creating your own using the mentor curriculum?
For new members! If a new Mentor joins in this month, have them introduce themself (refer to November) and share the Cohort’s communication expectations with them!
For new Cohorts! Take a look at the tab ‘Getting Started (or November)’ to get your Cohort started for the season.
In January, teams are likely focused on Ideation. Below are some topics to discuss with your Cohort.
- Discuss strategies for supporting your team to find an innovative idea
- Review the app gallery and look for project ideas that are commonly tackled
- Think about how you can get your team to think about new problems to address, or new solutions to problems previously addressed
- Team resolution
- Share ideas of how to get girls to come together and agree on a single idea to work on
- Referencing the team agreement is a great proactive approach to resolution
February should mark the end of the ideation phase and the start of exploring coding.
This is also a great time to check-in with the team about how they plan to spend their remaining time building their project and completing accompanying submission requirements.
- Ideation to Coding (video resource for Mentors)
- Share strategies about creating MVPs (minimum viable products)
- Where possible, explore the possibility of meeting with other teams to learn coding together!
- This is especially helpful for teams with 1 girl on them
- Talk about how you can implement teaching strategies like Pair Programming within and among your teams
- Is there a Mentor with strong technical skills who is willing to teach the other teams in a big group meeting?
- Project planning
- Share project plans to get ideas of pacing from different teams
- Post your team’s project plan to share with other Mentors and motivate each other to keep supporting teams
- If your team is stuck on one part of the project, ask your Cohort for advice
- Celebrating what has been done!
March is good time to test out the first feature built by the team. Junior and senior teams should think about their entrepreneurship plans. The following topics will help your Cohort guide teams through this phase and get support from each other.
- Coding
- Part of the rubric requires that teams get user feedback
- Mentors should invite Mentors from their Cohort to test each other’s team’s app and give feedback
- Entrepreneurship (for junior and senior team Mentors)
- Has your team thought about how their idea translates into a plan?
- Share advice on how teams should approach financial projections. Is there a Mentor in the Cohort who is comfortable sharing advice or leading a short session for the other teams?
- Share about your team’s progress so far (consider sending a video)
- If your team is stuck on one part of the project, ask your Cohort for advice
- Celebrating what has been done!
April is the homestretch of working on the program. The focus should be keeping teams motivated and checking in to make sure they have what they need and help with prioritizing tasks.
- Coding
- Part of the rubric requires that teams get user feedback
- Mentors should invite Mentors from their Cohort to test each other’s team’s app and give feedback
- Entrepreneurship (for junior and senior team mentors)
- How is progress on the user adoption or business plan going?
- Pitch
- Teams can pitch to the other Mentors in the Cohort to share feedback
- Submission & Celebration (consider sending a video)
- Share with the Cohort as teams submit parts of their submission and celebrate with the other Mentors
- Cohort teams can come together to have a celebration together of completing the season (whether or not the team submitted)
Ways to Engage with your Cohort
Check out some of the ways that your Cohort can connect below! Click on each title to reveal more details.
Slack Thread
Slack channels are a great way to communicate a little more instantly than platforms like email. It can be easy for messages to get lost if you are organized.
Slack threads keep conversations in the same space, organized and easy to follow. When someone asks a question or shares a piece of advice that you really enjoy, replying in thread makes it simpler to find answers later.
On desktop (refer to image on left), hover over a message and select the chat bubble or reply in thread icon.
On mobile, select the message and tap Reply in Thread, or tap the Add a reply field to add to an existing thread.
Video or Audio Recordings
Consider sharing your messages as a video or audio recording with your Cohort!
You can see each other’s faces making it feel more personable when interacting. Some people prefer verbal communication over written. They can be more expressive, it feels more conversational and can help add tone to a message giving it better context.
Bonus: You can create video or audio recordings right in Slack to share. And it automatically creates a transcript of what you’ve said, which is great for anyone who may prefer to read what you’ve said or can’t access audio at that time.
Email Thread
Your group may decide to stay connected via email. This is a great option if you are an avid user of email already. Here are some best practices to help make the most of email connections with a group:
- add all your Cohort members to your contacts or safe list to avoid their emails going into your Spam/Junk folder
- include all members in the initial email, and reply all. That way everyone can see the question, answers, and contribute
- make the subject line clear and easy to find
- tip: think about what key term is best to search to find the email later; “Cohort”, “Mentor question”, “Technovation Cohort”, etc.
- try to keep each email thread for one topic. If you have a question that is not related to that last email thread your Cohort was in, consider sending a new email
Think, Pair, Share
This is a great tactic of sharing information that can be used in virtual and in-person meetings!
- Pose a question
- THINK to yourself about the answer
- Speak about your response to someone else in a PAIR (you can use breakout rooms virtually)
- Come back together as a large group to SHARE about what you talked about in your pair
Bonus: this is a great strategy to use with your teams.
Group discussion formats
Deciding on the format to have discussions can help set expectations for what meetings with the Cohort will look like. The format can change depending on the topic or meeting, and it can be a format not listed below.
Sequential: You go in order and everyone in the group must participate
Non-sequential: You go in order and participants can pass
Popcorn: There’s no order and anyone can choose to jump in at any time, or choose to not participate
I still have a question
You can always reach out to Technovation’s Volunteer Engagement Team on Slack or at [email protected].
