Provide your mentees, advisees, and students with opportunities to share their backgrounds and experiences to create opportunities to connect interpersonally.
Come to meetings with research students strategically unprepared so that it’s easier to work with them as collaborators.
Follow up the question “How are you?” with asking your students deeper questions, like “How’s your stress level?”, to show you care and to dig below the surface-level small talk when you bump into your students.
Have students complete a weekly log about what they accomplished this week, what they hope to accomplish next week, and what might hold them back from accomplishing these things.
Make all students say “I don’t understand” out loud, in front of the class to show them that nothing bad will happen to help them feel more comfortable saying something when they don’t understand something in the future.
Teach students to use a system of inquiry, testing, and refining to debug their code, develop better coding habits, and deal with their frustration.
Have students write pseudocode as a pre-lab exercise so they are prepared to write code when lab begins.
Provide more than one solution when explaining how to solve a problem to the class to emphasize that there is never just one way to do things.
Put more time into explaining content than you think is necessary because students may not retain all the material the first time you explain it.
Encourage students to ask questions about homework assignments in class, because other students may be struggling with the same question.
Train teaching assistants on how to provide feedback using the growth mindset so they can keep their students motivated to improve their skills and understanding.
Create an environment where students feel safe approaching teaching assistants for help to ensure they get all the support they need to succeed in the course.
Adjust all assignments to be a certain length in order to create and maintain consistent deadlines (e.g., weekly) so students remember when their homework is due.
Keep a running list of bugs you encounter to share with students so that they can see you run into bugs too.
Motivate unpaid teaching assistants (TAs) by creating a TA community, recognizing excellent TAs, and offering TAs a letter of recommendation.
Allow students who have trouble handwriting to type up assignments and assessments on word processing tools so they can focus on communicating their understanding of the material.
Seek out others to be part of your mentees’ mentoring team to ensure they have access to a wide network of mentors that can relate to and provide support for the wide variety of situations they’ll encounter.