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It’s All About the Relationship
We all need someone who genuinely listens, supports and encourages our personal and/or professional growth.
October 20, 2005 |
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By Barbara Rubin Brier
In my last post, which I intended to be about mentoring, I got waylaid by a connection that took me by surprise. What I learned from that is that blogging can be a very self-indulgent enterprise. Self-indulgence is certainly nothing to be sneezed at – who better to indulge? But on reflection, I realized that there was something I really wanted to say about mentoring before my days as Noah’s guest blogger expired.
As I said, after close to a year of research on principal mentoring, it all really came down to this: having someone who genuinely listens, supports and encourages your personal and/or professional growth is invaluable. Not to belabor the point, but … duh!!! It’s all about the relationship. What we seem to forget is that it’s always been all about the relationship, whether we’re students, teachers or principals.
Here’s my point: it is ironic -- and extremely unfortunate -- that schools can’t seem to retain that information. They’re always looking for a magic bullet here or there, when we all know that a good teacher and/or mentor (they’re often synonymous) can change a student’s life. The movie, In and Out, springs immediately to mind: a former student, receiving an academy award, thanks his high school English teacher. The movie may be about the accidental outing of the Kevin Kline character, but the situation – thanking a teacher in a time of personal accomplishment – is pretty ubiquitous. (It works in the reverse as well, witness Noah’s previous post.)
Sadly, being an educational change consultant, I see school improvement initiatives come and go all the time -- so often, in fact, that veteran teachers generally respond to new ideas with the attitude that ‘this too shall pass.’ (The upside of this attitude is that it’s enabled many educators to withstand the stress of No Child Left Behind – hopefully, it will pass soon!)
But skeptical as I may be, I applaud the growing interest in principal mentoring and sincerely hope schools and school districts heed the need for leadership support. (It wouldn’t hurt if the typical central office bureaucrats assumed some responsibility for this, either!)
Then, if we could develop more comprehensive teacher and student mentoring programs, and remember that having someone who genuinely listens, supports and encourages your personal and/or professional growth is invaluable, we might actually be able to make a consistent difference in young people’s lives.
As I’ve said before, in the long run, I think that the role of secondary school teachers will focus more on things like mentoring and facilitating higher order thinking. But until then, what we desperately need in our poorer communities and urban centers are teachers, administrators and people like you and me – people who care about kids and are willing to be there for them – to facilitate their learning based on their individual needs (which often have nothing to do with academics!)
So become a mentor! It offers as many rewards to the mentor as it does to the mentee. My sister just signed up with an organization called iMentor, which operates in the New York metropolitan area and is specifically geared to electronic interaction, but almost every major school system has some sort of student mentoring program. Just call your local school, district office or board of education to find out and sign up. That's it -- that's what I wanted to say about mentoring.
P.S. This is my final entry as Noah’s guest blogger, as I’m off to GWU for parents’ weekend and then to Providence for a conference. So I’d like to thank Noah for trusting me with this. It is all about the relationship -- and it means the world to me.
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