ABSTRACT
Some key guidelines are useful to help a medical education mentor, trying to assist a new scholar in the discipline. When mentoring learners and faculty new to research in a medical education scholarship project, three phrases may prove useful. In this sense, the mentor should be as knowledgeable of the local reality as possible. Scholarship in this area is thus very timely, as is a better understanding of how to mentor medical education research at a distance. Clearly, a train-the-trainer and capacity-building approach, building in a layer of mentorship at the local level becomes even more important. Mentoring a learner or colleague in medical education research can be very rewarding and impactful, as it can have exponentially additive effects. As in other types of teaching and mentorship, enthusiasm for the material and project, as well as establishing a relationship based on the trust that have the mentees best interests at heart, are key.
