Telementor Guide

What does telementoring bring to the classroom? An important part of what a mentor does is facilitate students' best thinking by "problematizing" work which they might approach in a simplistic way. As most teachers know who have tried to give students greater control over their own learning, inexperienced investigators often bite off more than they can chew, or trim a problem down to trivial proportions. One of the teachers involved in our early telementoring work explained how the participation of mentors in students' work can motivate their efforts toward understanding: I'm hoping that by being involved with [their telementors],that they're putting [their work] out there for someone else. That they're going to be a little more critical of themselves, because it's not me that they've known for three years and they know that if they smile nicely I won't get so mad about it.... They'll have somebody new that they're presenting it to, and somebody who will give them a different kind of feedback than the feedback I've given them.