When I was teaching face to face in the public high schools. every new teacher was assigned a senior teacher mentor. I was told that the reason each junior teacher had a mentor was to guide the junior teacher and prevent teacher burnout. I was also told that teacher attrition was high due to teacher burnout, low pay, low teacher morale and problems with classroom discipline.
Most young teachers leave teaching after teaching only 2 years. Having a teacher mentor helped increase the chances that young teachers would stay on the job.
I had a great teacher mentor. She helped me get acquainted with the school culture. She introduced me to her friends. She took me into her confidence. We became good friends. Whenever I had a problem with students, she knew exactly what to do to solve the problem. Students loved her too. She had taught in that same classroom in that same school for close to 40 years. She even taught the students' parents, and their children.
She told me that when she first started teaching, the principals at the school squarely supported the teacher because the teacher had a lot of power. Parents used to listen to the teacher and the principal would support whatever the teacher said. Then she said, sadly times have changed and now the principal now supports the parents more. She thinks this is one of the reasons why there is high teacher attrition.
She taught me how to make effective lesson plans. She taught me to write my lessons on all the boards before classes started so that as the day went on, I would just go from blackboard to blackboard with each new class period.
She taught me how to take attendance, do the administrative paperwork, properly fill out the grade book, how to talk to students, how to apportion my classroom periods with attendance, then a short review of yesterday's lesson, homework check, then short lesson of the day, or a test. She taught me how to handle difficult students, how to get students to respect my authority, how to create and enforce classroom rules and most importantly, how to win the student's hearts.
I learned from her that the students are more important than the lesson. When I was in college, it was all about creating the perfect lesson based on the most current teaching methodology, but the mentor taught me that if you can't win over the students' trust, it does not matter how perfect your lesson is because nobody will listen to you. Let me tell you, she was very effective in winning over her students.
When she read out loud, The Little Prince, in French, she would cry over the sad parts and she would move the students so much, they cried with her. She wore her emotions on her sleeve. She would listen to every student problem. She really loved her students and her students learned to love her.
Mentors teach you what you do not learn in college. They provide you with real world knowledge and what it is really like to teach in the field. They provide you with their experience based on newbie mistakes they themselves had made. To this day, my mentor is still my life long friend even though she has long retired from teaching.
Every time I have a classroom problem, I still call her and she still has a solution to every problem. Someday, when I grow up, I want to be as good a teacher as my mentor was. It is important to have a caring mentor to inspire students, and it is important to have a caring friend and mentor for junior teachers too.
When a school establishes a mentoring system, there is a lot less teacher attrition. You just have to get lucky you get a nice, effective, caring mentor to succeed. I lucked out when I got the best teacher mentor in the world who taught me that students are the most important element in teaching, not the lesson.
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