Telementor Guide

What judgment calls do mentors have to make when crafting advice? Because telementoring involves the exchange of messages over computers, it can easily be mistaken for a straightforward exchange of information. In this simplistic view, the job of telementors is sometimes thought to be making mentees work for every clue they get. However, badgering students with Socratic questions turns out not to be well adapted to the kind of curriculum-based inquiry telementoring that we discuss here. The most frequent result of this approach is that mentees simply disengage. If every question leads only to another question, students quickly get the idea that they are wasting their time with you. To clarify the types of judgments that mentors are called upon to make when offering advice to students, we use the metaphor of "the foothills and the mountain". Imagine for a moment that you are a guide on a mountain climbing expedition. Your climbing team includes your mentees and their teacher, who together (with your help) must decide which of the peaks in the range they are going to ascend, and what route they are going to take to get there. As the team’s guide, you want to make sure they don’t waste their time and energy. It can be deadly to run out of food or fuel part of the way up the mountain; so your objective is to help the team find the most direct route to wherever they're headed. You especially don’t want the team to waste their time and resources wandering around in the foothills, when they could instead be making an assault on the summit.