The Value of Mentoring New Teachers

If you think back to your first job out of school, you can remember the feelings of pressure and anxiety of beginning a new job. Many of us moved to new places where we knew no one or our way around. This is how many new teachers feel today when beginning a new teaching job at a new school. The annual turnover for teachers is nearly 16 percent. For many, the reason may be because they didn’t like their working environment. Mentoring teachers can be an important factor in cultivating a positive working environment within all schools.
Every year, schools continue to search for new teachers who can help make the world a better place through teaching. Although it’s hard to compare schools to private businesses, there are some overlapping factors that should be taken into consideration, like workplace environment.
Mentoring creates a positive workplace and educational environment within the schools. Through a mentorship experience, teachers are able to learn about their environment and how implement ideas to improve it for the overall school. For example, as soon as a new teacher comes into the building on the first day of school, they may not understand the type of atmosphere within the school. It can be a very difficult time for new teachers because they don’t know what the school’s process may be in certain situations. Mentorship allows new teachers to have someone to turn to with questions, ideas, and feedback. This creates a caring community that will benefit the whole environment overall.
Mentoring can also improve teacher quality. The mentorship process requires time in order to establish a relationship based on trust. Through this process, mentors are able to give critical and suggestive feedback so that mentees may learn. Through the observation process, both, mentors and mentees are able to see teaching processes from the outside, while grasping new concepts and ideas. Mentors may also learn things about themselves or develop processes that can be taken into consideration for overall quality improvement through growth and development.
One important reason that mentoring is necessary in the road to improvement is because it creates quality education for our students. As we all know, teachers are very important to our world because they create the students in charge of the future. With this in mind, teachers must continue to grow and develop themselves, while helping others around them do the same. Mentorship is a gift that can be passed to one another to create a better world. It is the social responsibility of influencing and helping build a positive community for the future. Through the process of educating one another throughout our lives, we can establish a better workplace, quality education for our students, and an overall positive community.