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Discussion on: How Do You Support Remote Juniors?

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danieleframpton profile image
Daniel Frampton • Edited

As a current bootcamp student, I appreciate that you asked the question, Marc!

I am a fan of apps that explicitly offer time slots and ease the process of scheduling paired programming sessions. At Turing School in Denver, students built an app called Paired that lets students earlier in the program book paired programming sessions with students further along. The opt-in time slots are built around common down-time (before class, over lunch, or after class) to reduce obstacles to arranging a meeting. While it was designed for in-person meetings, after the recent restrictions we simply shifted to using it to plan remote sessions.

I've also been helping students arrange "rock-and-pebble" peer mentoring relationships between students, which provides students early in the program someone they feel explicit permission to ask for help or advice from. We've seen this be helpful particularly for people who are uncertain about whether they're asking the "right questions" and struggle to open up to instructors or mentor figures.

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m_nevin profile image
Marc Nevin

Ohhh thanks for sharing Daniel, this all sounds great!

Helping arrange slots with their mentors is a super idea, apprentices have mentors who are the year above them but I don't think they end up contacting each other that much, maybe encouraging them to take the time will help,

All this makes me think myself and some of the others could offer some "office hours" to the newest staff giving them the opportunity to ask whatever they want or even just have a chat like they could in the office!