My Mentor Revived My Career!

Richard Warren is the 2019 Maryland Teacher of the Year and a secondary STEM teacher at Crisfield High School in Somerset County. Richard’s degrees include a master’s in teaching and a doctorate in educational leadership.

My career as a teacher has not always been the easiest. My first few years of teaching were the most stressful, draining, and demanding years of my life. I contemplated moving to different districts, private schools, and even considered leaving the teaching profession all together. I hoped mak­ing a change would somehow provide me the relief, recovery, and restoration I longed for. Things were pretty gloomy.

I tried my hardest to fight through it, to stay strong, and to persevere until one day I reached my breaking point. This was it. If I did not reach out for help or find a mentor who could provide me with the support I knew I needed, my career and I would fail. That just wasn’t an option for me.

Fortunately, things started looking up when I found mentors through my district’s mentoring and induction program. They had experience, great skills, and excellent classroom wisdom.

I was provided with classroom management techniques, effective lesson planning tips, methods for instruction, and hacks to take my life back. My mentors revived my career! Each encounter, experience, and interaction with them helped me to survive and thrive in the classroom. I am now an exem­plary teacher and the newly named Maryland State Teacher of the Year.

I was able to overcome my struggles with the help of mentors who provided me with what I needed to be successful and helped me create learning environments that resulted in academic success for my students. But the truth is that the beginning of my story is a lot like that of most beginning teachers who struggle with the demands of our profession. There are many educators who need the mentoring that helped me so much.

I believe all beginning teachers should have an effective mentoring program to succeed in the career they’ve likely dreamed of most of their lives.

The sink-or-swim approach to induction is counter-intuitive to the success of new teachers, their students, and their school communities. Even with exemplary pre-service preparation, new teachers are faced with a constant flow of distinct challenges in their initial years in the classroom — classroom management, motivating students, dealing with the individual differences among students, assessing student work, and relations with parents. It’s difficult for new teachers to navigate the steep learning curve of the early years in a profession that is so often solitary in execution. It’s like drowning with no life boat in sight.

My latest research on beginning teacher mentoring programs reveals that such pro­grams must have classroom, instruc­tional, social-emotional, logistical, and human resource supports built in to nurture and retain good teachers. According to participant mentors in one study, fostering professional learning communities, building relationships, providing guid­ance on how to move teaching practice and student learning forward, and sanctioning time for mentor-to-mentee interaction are the most important compo­nents of a mentor­ing program. These components play a critical role in a beginning teacher’s decision to remain in a school district and ultimately the profession.

It is our responsibility to invest in the next generation of teachers. It’s hard to believe that with the teacher retention problems that Maryland faces annually, we don’t provide adequate funding to support local mentoring programs. It’s a problem that needs a solid and permanent solution if we are to truly support our students and our educators.

Richard Warren is the 2019 Maryland Teacher of the Year and a secondary STEM teacher at Crisfield High School in Somerset County. Richard’s degrees include a master’s in teaching and a doctorate in educational leadership.