Mentoring Rings True to Me

I’ve been so lucky to have incredible mentors. As I blogged previously, the insight and growth that I have achieved through my relationship with my mentors is immeasurable. Long after these incredible teachers were officially in roles to support my practice, they continue to take the time to provide feedback, give me direction, and help me unpack the “now what”. You can read about my appreciation for my mentors and how one in particular helped lead me to developing Building Outside the Blocks on a previous post. There is not enough room in the blogosphere, however, to truly reveal the depth of gratitude that I have for all the influential mentors who have done so much to help me develop as a person and a professional.

Last night, I found myself grinning from ear to ear speaking about the power of mentorship. The woman with whom I was talking is a great teacher and has been developing her mentorship skills formally through the support of her admin team. As a vice principal, one of her roles is to nurture new staff, and so she was sent for training in New York through the New Teacher Centre. As a result of this course, she has improved her mentorship skills in order to build capacity among new teachers and help with retention. As she told me about my smile, I realized that this is really something I should explore further.

Supporting teachers is one of my passions because it has so much reach. When you empower others, especially educators, you have the ability to impact their teaching, which affects many more students. Mentorship can have a ripple effect that extends past the boundaries of the knowable. When you help a teacher breathe a bit deeper or refine a way of doing something, you know that you have helped enable their ability to reach more learners. I often feel compelled to pay it forward when someone helps me improve my ability to do what I love. That is how I am feeling about teacher mentorship.

This past fall, I offered to participate as one of Dr. Patricia Briscoe’s virtual mentors at Niagara University. When I first agreed to take on this role, I saw it as a fun way to share my love of teaching and my sense of the big ideas outside my school community, where I have often mentored new teachers both formally and informally. After several months of meeting with these lovely, enthusiastic future educators from afar, I feel so good about the work. I hope that something I shared or the manner in which I shared it will help them persevere through the challenges and tribulations of becoming a teacher. I hope that I have infused them with something more than they had before.

As I look from new angles and gain new perspectives (my #OneWord2017) on what I love most about teaching and what skills I want to cultivate further, I see that teacher mentorship is something that both interests and excites me. This realization rings so true for me that I now see why being a mentor is one of the things that really lights me up.

#mentor #mentoring #mentorship #gratitude #professionallearning #success