“The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery,” said Mark Van Doren, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and professor of English at Columbia University for nearly 40 years.
I wish I had discovered that profound thought when I began teaching 54 years ago. I would have approached my task as a teacher and the subsequent 38 years in both elementary and secondary classrooms from a different point of view.
The word “education,” after all, is derived from two Latin roots: educare, to train, to mould, and educere, to draw out, to lead out — not to “pour in.”
My first few weeks as a teacher were challenging, mainly because I saw my job as filling the students with knowledge. There was nobody to advise me otherwise.
Not that teaching became easier in the many ensuing years. Unlike in other professions, such as medicine or the law, the novice teacher is not provided with a post-training mentor, a coach if you will.
The beginner teacher is on his/her own in a classroom from day one with 20 to 30 often involuntary clients — five hours a day for 189 days each year.
During my first few years of teaching, there was no regular professional support or guidance, no trusted guide advising about why some of my teaching strategies were successful while other were not.
And that, I now realize, was exactly what would have shortened the long bumpy journey to skilled teaching.
“Sink or swim” doesn’t begin to describe that first year or so and, unfortunately for some first-year teachers, the decision is made: “This is not for me.”
To further complicate matters, as University of Victoria research associate Lesley Scott points out in her paper Teaching Excellence, A Briefing Paper, there was not then — and is not even now — a clear road map describing the path to teaching excellence. “The complex and contextual nature of teaching makes the goal of defining teaching excellence difficult,” Scott writes. “As already indicated, there is no universal definition of teaching excellence.”
Scott’s paper focuses on teaching excellence at the university level, but the point is also relevant and applicable to teaching K-12.
That’s why teacher-mentoring initiatives like the Ohio Resident Educator Program, which began in 2011, seem like such a good idea.
The Ohio program, which evolved over a number of years, is probably one of the most thorough and comprehensive state-wide teacher-mentoring programs.
It is a four-year initiative to assist beginning teachers (called “Resident Educators”) with mentoring as they start their education careers.
The Resident Educator Program assigns a trained mentor to neophyte teachers and is designed to improve teacher retention, enhance teacher quality and thus improve student achievement.
When the Resident Educator has completed four years of the program successfully and has passed the Resident Educator Summative Assessment (RESA), a performance assessment that requires Resident Educators to demonstrate their knowledge and skills as revealed in their day-to-day teaching, only then can he/she apply for a teaching licence.
The RESA consists of one task, the Lesson Reflection. Resident educators are asked to provide evidence of how they implement the Teaching and Learning Cycle to support important learning outcomes for all students.
Through the process, the Resident Educator analyzes planning decisions for the lesson, illustrates actual teaching in a video segment that is up to 20 minutes long, and reflects on the success of the entire lesson.
There are sa国际传媒 teacher-mentoring programs, but in a time of teacher shortages (sa国际传媒’s 60 school districts are currently short about 500 teachers), setting up and maintaining such programs has been a challenge.
Maple Ridge is one example of a district that has continued to find ways to support not only new teachers but teachers who are moving from one teaching specialty to another. According to assistant superintendent Jovo Bikic, the program is well subscribed and widely regarded as an asset to the district.
Coquitlam School District also has an established mentoring program for teachers who are new to the career, new to a grade or new to the community.
Mentoring programs can be complicated. The mentor/mentee relationship depends on both the willingness to provide mentoring on the one hand and to accept it on the other hand.
In almost any field of human activity — sports, drama, music or even relationships — the willingness to accept coaching or mentoring is regarded as a valuable adjunct to success, or at least performance improvement.
As John Whitmore, author of Coaching for Performance, wrote: “Coaching is unlocking people’s potential to maximize their own performance …. as with any new skill, attitude, style, or belief, adopting a coaching ethos requires commitment, practice, and some time before it flows naturally and its effectiveness is optimized.”
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
