Teaching and Mentoring
You are in a unique position if you are a teacher. Sharing your wisdom with others can help them grow as individuals. Few of life's careers are as rewarding as a career in teaching. Being a mentor is natural for a teacher.
In addition to sharing your knowledge of a certain subject, you can also mentor your students who also want to become teachers. In this way, you can not only help someone else achieve the goals that you, yourself once aspired to attain, but also to insure that your teaching legacy continues.
There are several different avenues for teacher mentoring. Teacher mentoring is available at both a professional as well as interpersonal level. It does not have to be formal mentoring at all. A student can simply come to you for help with their career when they need help.
Mentoring is not something that you do for a short period of time. It can sometimes be a lifetime career in itself. The person who you mentor will need help throughout their career. They will look to you as the voice of wisdom when they are struggling with teaching issues. You can then be there to mentor them and help show them the way.
In return for your teacher mentoring, what do you get? Another teacher. Someone who will go on teaching long after you have retired from the school system. There is no monetary value to mentoring, the value in this activity goes far beyond dollars and cents. When it comes to mentoring a teacher, the outcome benefits not only the person whom you mentor, but the students who the teacher teaches. Perhaps one of them will also want to become a teacher. Each bit of positive knowledge that you share with someone has a way of affecting others in a positive way.
What do you ask for your mentoring skills? If you are wise, you should only ask that the teacher who you mentor be available to do the same for someone else at some time in his or her life. You can never be paid back for mentoring, but you can ask that the person that you mentor pay it forward, so to speak.
It is not difficult to mentor another. It means sharing your knowledge with someone whose goals are similar to yours. Helping your fellow man is what mentoring is all about. It is a noble profession to be a teacher. Although the pay may not be the best, money is not the reason that teachers go into this profession. People become teachers so that they can make a difference in the world. If, by mentoring another teacher, you can make a difference in their world, that teacher can then make a difference in the world of his or her students, who can then go on to making an even greater impact on the world. The ultimate form of mentoring is to mentor a teacher. Doing so can allow your legacy to continue to live on, long after you have left this earth. Consider mentoring a young teacher if you are a teacher, using your wisdom to allow them to grow.
Leave a comment | View Comments