I used undergraduate peer mentors in my intermediate microeconomics class in the late 1990s.  Their function was mainly to staff online office hours, held in the evening.  After a couple of iterations of this we then started to also have face to face office hours staffed by these same peer mentors, because some students said they wanted them. In this way we avoided complaints, though the online office hours were much more heavily utilized.

The bulk of discussion during office hours concerned homework problems and how to work them.  I had given the peer mentors solutions to the problems that had been assigned from the textbook.  These were solutions I had written up.  I gave the mentors instructions to not give the solutions to the students but rather to help them think through how to work the problems.  The first time I used peer mentors that was it for their training.  They learned to be a peer mentor by doing it, adjusting the approach based on how it had gone before.  There was a technical issue about whether to use the discussion board or the text chat.  I believe they ultimately ended up preferring the text chat and then copying that when the chat was over and pasting into the discussion board so other students could review it. On how to respond to a particular question from a student, the peer mentors figured that out on their own.

As I recruited peer mentors from students who had taken the class and done reasonably well in it, in subsequent iterations of the course the mentors may very well have participated in one or more of those chats as a student and/or they may have read chats posted to the discussion board. So they brought with them that experience as students.  In addition to what I described above, we would also do a lunch before the start of the semester, so the new peer mentors could meet the ones who returned from the last time and so their received wisdom could be shared with the group.

For the most part that preparation proved sufficient.  The TAs also had the added security blanket that they could chat with me online if they got stuck.  I was available much of the time.  I don’t recall that happening much, but all of this is now a distant memory.  I do recall a couple of issues for which the preparation I provided was inadequate. One example happened to an African-American peer mentor when she was helping a student who got frustrated and made some racist remarks.  The incident caused me to get flustered.  I didn’t have the expertise how to manage it well.  So I clearly couldn’t have prepared the mentors to handle such situations should they arise.  But it does suggest to me that mentors would benefit from some training on how to respond to angry students.

In using peer mentors in other courses, instructors may very well want the mentors to do many other things beyond conducting office hours and/or even in office hour mode the topics of discussion might be much more varied than they were in my class.  The mentors must then be prepared, both content-wise and playing-their-role-wise.

One approach for doing this, particularly for gaining competence in the latter, is for the student to take a course where developing such competence is the focus and then viewing the peer mentoring activity as the practicum that is associated with this course.  Quite conceivably, this course would be taught by one instructor while the student would serve as peer mentor in a course taught by a different instructor, possibly in a different department. This second instructor would have responsibility to prepare the peer mentor content-wise, but certainly would also have a strong interest that the playing-their-role course was preparing their peer mentor in a suitable way.

Now lets envision that there are several different subject matter courses that utilize peer mentors where each relies on the same playing-their-role course.  The only way that would work in an effective manner is for a community to form among these instructors, and then where some general agreement emerges as to how the playing-their-role course should be structured.

Thus a systematic approach to peer mentoring seems to imply a need for a community based in developing any playing-their-role course.  It may then be that disciplinary affinity suggests having multiple distinct communities with a different playing-their-role course for each separate community.  In other words, peer mentors in humanities courses might take a different playing-their role course than peer mentors in engineering take.

Whether one community that spans the entire campus can work is an open question that we should not try to answer a priori.  It is a question this project will aim to address.