Differences Between a Teacher and a Mentor

Rogelio Valdés

Feb 9, 2022

Have you ever been sitting in class and suddenly realized you completely lost focus on what the teacher was saying?

I think almost everyone who went through a traditional school has experienced that. You end up staring at the ceiling or out the window, thinking about something else. In general, students are not actively participating or deeply engaged in the teacher’s lecture.

The idea of spending hours delivering lectures, reading slides, or repeating the textbook made sense when suddenly we had one teacher and a hundred students to educate. A hundred years ago, before technology existed the way it does today, that method did not guarantee everyone would truly understand the topic. But it was the most efficient way to make sure at least some of the knowledge reached everyone. Today, the situation is completely different.

If we want students to engage actively in learning, we need to treat learning as a social activity. The role of the teacher has to change. We no longer need one-hour lectures. We need mentors who act as facilitators of learning.

When I was in the first semester of my Engineering in Innovation and Development degree at Tec de Monterrey, I took a class that completely changed the way I understood education.

It was called FISMAT, because it combined physics and math for engineering into one subject. A great name, obviously.

What made that class different was that the teachers never lectured. It was not a flipped classroom model where students researched a topic and then taught the class either. Instead, the teachers presented us with challenges and questions, gave us materials, and then gave us an hour to figure out possible answers and solutions. We worked in teams of three or four, and at the end of each session we had a Socratic dialogue where we shared what we found with the rest of the group.

And the truth is that the problems themselves were not so different from those in a traditional class. We were asking the same questions about how to predict how long it takes for a ball to fall or how to calculate travel time. The difference is that in a traditional setting, someone first explains the topic, gives examples, provides formulas, and then assigns exercises that are not exactly the same as the examples but are solved using the same method. In FISMAT, we were given the problem with no explanation and no formula. We were not even allowed to search online.

At first, it sounds like the worst strategy in the world. How can you ask students to solve a problem they have never faced before? But I think you already know where I am going with this story. In real life, we face new problems every day, problems we do not already know how to solve.

We also had a huge advantage: two mentors who facilitated every session. They did not hand us the answer, but they could guide us by asking the right questions. Newton faced the same challenge of predicting how a falling object behaves, and he did not have anyone helping him, not even calculators.

I understood that the role of the mentor in this kind of education is to design the challenges, ask the right questions, moderate group discussion, make it easier for everyone to share their point of view, and make sure students participate actively. A mentor is the person who makes things easier to understand while still refusing to simply give away the answer.

In no FISMAT class did I feel bored. I always arrived excited to discover what challenge we would tackle that day, and it became my favorite subject, even though it started at 7:30 in the morning. What I enjoyed most was figuring out formulas and ways to integrate and derive on my own. We were not just applying a recipe. We were discovering the recipe ourselves.

That is the philosophy we follow in our group activities. Every group in our elementary and middle school is led by a mentor, not someone who lectures, but someone who facilitates learning.

There are still spaces for individualized and personalized work because each student follows a different learning path. But when we come together in group activities, we want the experience to be truly social.

In a self-directed and personalized learning environment like Robin, students learn how to solve problems even when they have never seen them before. I love watching our students acquire academic knowledge, just as I once learned how to use formulas, integrate, and derive. But what excites me even more is watching them learn how to arrive at solutions on their own.