ˈmentôrSHip,ˈmentərSHip/
noun
noun: mentorship; plural noun: mentorships; noun: mentor-ship; plural noun: mentor-ships
- the guidance provided by a mentor, especially an experienced person in a company or educational institution.
A true mentor is one who nurtures your strengths while acknowledging and healing your weaknesses. They remind you of your potential and guide you to live up to your best self. The key word is guidance, which is the component that seems to be missing in the current wave of mentoring and coaching teachers being hired in public schools. It is yet one more example about how corporatism in its most archaic Dickensian sense has infiltrated education. The big data corporate model which has ripped the heart and soul out of public schools is precisely why they are falling apart. Administrators emerge from Universities ill prepared for true leadership, with an adversarial and punitive drive, not unlike the factory managers or the plantation overseers who were charged with increasing production at any cost. And who, you might ask, is the driver of that bus? Certainly not the doe-eyed teachers coming into the field intent on making a difference in children’s lives. And, I must say, the Principals and administrators I have worked with had the best of intentions. They did not pursue a higher degree out of a distain for teaching and learning. They generally care deeply about education and young people. But something certainly is amiss.
We know that new teachers should not be thrown into a classroom without a mentor or at least someone to coach them through that fly-by-the-seat-of- your pants first year. Yet we take Principals fresh from their sixth-year programs and throw them into the fire without so much as a hose. We all need mentors, but if administrators have been brainwashed by bureaucrats that teachers are the problem, they stand little chance of initiating meaningful change. Gone are the days when the Principal was respected and perhaps even revered by teacher. During simpler times and a less contentious polity, one would have earned one’s stripes as a Principal with at least five years of classroom experience. Teachers find it easier to trust someone’s judgement if they’ve been in the trenches with you. True mentorship is a relationship of trust and partnership. Any wisdom imparted by a mentor should be a respectable nudge toward your own excellence. Onward and upward. All for one and one for all. Unfortunately, the current model appears to be more of a “gotcha trap” and teachers are coming out of the ring thoroughly beaten down.
One old-school mentor prototype is the much-admired former principal of the elementary school in my town. He served at least thirty-five years ago, yet I still run into retired teachers who remember him fondly. He had long passed by the time I went to work there, but there were still colleagues who looked back on those years as the “Happy Days” of their career. They longed for that kind of a leader. He could walk into a classroom and know within five minutes what kind of a teacher he was dealing with. A keen observer of behavior in children and adults, he was able to evaluate the learning by the engagement of the students and a conversation in the bus line. And if a child was allowed to wander around the room during a lesson, points were not taken away, but added to the teacher’s portfolio. After all, it was about the child’s learning needs, not the data. He didn’t micro-manage their classrooms. He didn’t monitor test scores – because, well, there weren’t any tests back then. Instead, he banked on familiarity and diversity, knowing that every teacher and every child had different learning styles and needs. When you respect the talents and skills of your staff, and nurture their strengths, you create a safe culture of teaching and learning. Rather than the cookie-cutter data driven approach, teachers were encouraged to do it their way. As long as the outcome was the same, it was O.K. to take different paths to get there.
Before high-stakes testing and the data driven models that help to line those deep corporate pockets, schools used to be about the kids. And old-school principals, knew that the students, their families, the culture of their small, rural or large inner-city school mattered. There was no one-size-fits-all homogeneity. Schools varied as much as their neighborhoods. Although it was by no means perfect, I can guarantee that teachers and most of their students were a much happier lot than they are now. Rather than achieving excellence, corporatism has provided a long slide toward mediocrity.
It’s true that the success of public education may have been a bit too teacher-centered in the past. From Hallmark to Hollywood, we are reminded of those teachers who made a difference in some child’s life. My mother often recalled Miss Swan, who taught in the one-room schoolhouse she attended in New Hampshire in the 1930’s. Miss Swan was apparently an amazing teacher, and everyone got A’s and excelled in her school. If they worked hard, she would take them skating on the pond out back, or make hot cocoa. She had a long neck, just like a swan, and all the boys were in love with her. Having that much power over one’s curriculum, schedule, and ability to motivate students is unheard of these days. Yet the general public seems to believe that teacher’s reign like autocrats in their classrooms. I can’t tell you how often I had to fend off irate parents who were upset by a myriad of policies over which I had no control. Miss Swan may have called the shots in her classroom, but even back then, she must have had to answer to someone, either a District Principal, Superintendent, or board of education. Unfortunately, the school reform movement has also put too much focus on the teacher and spun a campaign of mis-information that public schools lack accountability and are riddled with dead-wood teachers who needed to be culled like weeds.
The tsunami wave of accountability was manufactured by the neo-conservative movement which promoted school choice during the Reagan presidency. Initially prompted by conservative Christians who wanted vouchers to send their children to private, Christian schools, the movement morphed into privatization. In the fashion of Betsy DeVos, corporations began to get their fingers deeply sunk in the public-school pie. Unwieldly data-driven programs and high-stakes testing quickly took a toll on public schools, especially poor urban and rural districts. Having already set students and teachers up for failure, while undermining public education, corporations were more than willing to offer costly solutions such as charter schools. The school choice movement finally got their champion in Betsy DeVos and her cadre of corporations who were more than willing to steal tax dollars away from public schools. The result has been disastrous for students as education is no longer the great equalizer, but a reversion of the great segregator. The achievement gap between rich and poor has widened, and racial segregation has reached pre-Jim Crow era levels.
You might be wondering what this has to do with an essay about mentoring. Fear not, as I haven’t strayed far off the path. After the corporate and data-driven model thoroughly dismantled the pedagogical wisdom and skills of America’s best public-school teachers, the next scam was to develop yet another industry to fix the mess they created. In the guise of “mentoring”, schools are now hiring Teacher Coaches, who have the unfortunate task of trying to guide teachers through their curriculum, data and evaluations. Like many of the administrators who have come out of the Universities in the last ten years, the “coaches” seem to have been told that public schools are not working because the teachers are inept or not working hard enough. Of course, this is a lie. Teachers are more highly trained and hard-working than any profession I can think of outside the medical field. But what better way to divide and conquer than to add yet one-more stress factor into the mix. Although my own experience with teaching coaches was generally positive, the model doesn’t appear to be working. Teaching coaches are too often hired to monitor and supervise staff. They have become the adversarial overseers of a corrupt and failing system. Unfortunately, those who have pumped billions of dollars into the corruption of public schools, while robbing them of their funding, would rather scapegoat teachers than admit defeat.
I was fortunate in my teaching career to have had two mentors who pushed me forward. The first was Dr. Ralph Yulo, who was the liaison between the local teaching university and the small environmental education program where I worked. Each week, he would bring a group of student teachers out to the program for their outdoor education practicum. I would teach them the lessons they would be teaching during the field trips. At the end of each day, and especially on Friday, we would debrief about how the day or the week went. Ralph would come out on Friday’s and sit on the floor in a circle with us while I led the budding teachers in a discussion. Ralph saw something in me that I didn’t even know existed. He saw a Teacher (with a capital T). Never in a million years would I have seen myself working in a school. I was a consummate outsider and hated school my whole life. I didn’t like being boxed in, which is why I loved teaching outdoors. But Ralph saw that little stone glimmering beneath the surface, and with a little excavation managed to convince me to finish my education and get a teaching degree. He never said harsh words, but gently pointed out my mistakes as one would do with an apprentice. Through encouragement rather than critique, he helped me to hone my skills and sail toward excellence. I never dreamed of greatness, because – well, poor kids rarely get mentors. We generally just get yelled at.
In graduate school, I found another mentor in my advisor, Dr. Sally Reis. Again, she didn’t focus on my weaknesses (I was, after all fairly under-educated even though I was working on a master’s degree). She recognized and encouraged me to use my gifts and talents. When she labeled me “creative productive”, I had a Sally Field moment of someone finally recognizing me. That little label gave me permission to continue my creative path, even while teaching, and to use my creativity in the classroom.
I don’t envy teachers just starting out in their careers. They are entering a profession which has been brutalized. Public schools are hardly the beacon of equalizing hope these days. New teachers will find themselves in toxic school climates where their colleagues are mere ghosts of who they once were and what they could have been. The workload and expectations border on abuse, and many of the younger people who arrive bright-eyed and ever-so hopeful that they can make a difference, will turn away, tail-between-the legs within the first year. They won’t know the joys of getting to know their students beyond data points or being able to stray from the curriculum because a student’s mom died, and the class wanted to write poetry that would help them all grieve. They won’t know what it’s like to drop everything for a teachable moment, or to whip out a guitar and sing a song that connects those creative learners to the history lesson. Nor will they have the advantage of being mentored by administrators and others in the profession who can share a little wisdom without tearing them apart. Mentoring is oh-so-much more than cracking the whip in the name of fidelity. It is about modeling, taking someone under your angel wings to nurture their talents and skills, and nudging them forward. It’s about cultivating a culture of teaching and learning where it is O.K. to make mistakes and to learn from them. Mentorship and coaching are pretty-much nonexistent in most schools. Instead, it has become yet another example of corporate management gone bad.