HCD.7:5.5 - Prepare Mentor Help before Counting It as Capacity

Two prospective mentors will help groups compare rival diagnostic explanations. Give each a qualified case, the intended personal action, representative learner mistakes and the limits of the mentor’s authority. Each independently selects a response to the same two learner attempts, explains its grounds and identifies the question that would require a specialist. A prepared teacher compares their responses against the case criteria, corrects incompatible advice and observes another attempt where needed. HCD.8 supplies the obtain-or-build and operating-test work if that competence is still missing.

For the pump case, an AI suggestion asks the learner to take a fresh pressure reading. The mentor must notice that this variant already supplies the reading and allows no further worthwhile observation. They reject that suggestion, use the qualified reference to ask about the pressure implication, and leave the model-selection operation with the learner. If the subject implication itself is unresolved, the mentor returns that exact question rather than improvising a criterion.

This is an application of §4.4’s existing human-check arrangement. Access to the suggestion tool adds no qualified mentor until the person can select, adapt or reject its output in the actual task. Reserve preparation, checking, live help and fallback separately. For example, two thirty-minute mentor preparation attempts and forty minutes of teacher comparison allocate 100 provider-minutes before live delivery. Include those minutes once in the product’s fixed preparation; count live windows and subsequent maintenance where they actually fall.

Tutor CoPilot, November 2025 revision supplies a bounded example of tutor-facing suggestions built from expert reasoning with human selection and editing. Its paid professional tutors received training; the study does not establish that unprepared volunteers can replace them, nor that exit-ticket effects show distant transfer or independent tutor learning. Its tool price is not a complete support cost. The diagnostic preparation above is an authored application, not that study’s observed result.