Mentoring: being teachable and

reinventing yourself
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Submitted 11 months 2 weeks ago by tereza.lombardi.
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A process that helps teachers to develop and maintain a teachable

attitude and daily to reinvent herself: this is the mentoring I have
been experiencing.

When I think of mentoring, two words pop in my mind: teachable and reinvent.
I connect mentoring to these words thanks to two dear colleagues of mine. One
of them taught me that in order to change your life and take risks, you need to
be teachable. My other friend told me that she needed to reinvent herself to
accept the challenge of teaching teens.

To my mind, this is the essence of mentoring: to help and support the teacher,
either a novice or a senior one-to develop and maintain a teachable attitude
and daily to reinvent herself. Actually this kind of mentoring was the one I have
been experiencing and that I practice until today .
It all started when I decided to change my professional life, after a long career
as an ELT teacher, and accepted the challenge to return to the elementary
classroom.

What made me change? Well, I think my 7 year old son was the reason why I
wanted to return to elementary school as he was about to start his first year
and I began questioning the traditional educational system followed by most
schools in my city.
Then a bilingual school with an innovative proposal for education, began its
activities in my town. I applied to be an elementary teacher there hoping to
find something more challenging for me and for my son. Fortunately I got the
job and my son began his elementary years there. I must say that, the
mentoring process I was about to experience really changed my personal and
professional life. I had been mentored and I mentored many novice teachers in
my previous jobs , so when I began in this school I expected the same kind of
mentoring process I had experienced before: weekly meetings with my mentor
to discuss possible difficulties I was having with planning, classroom
management, language teaching, etc… or to listen to my mentor’s feedback and
evaluation on one of my classes he or she had observed.

However, in this school mentoring was completely different. We did have our
coordinator and a senior teacher guiding us in weekly meetings, observing our
classes and giving us feedback. But, our mentoring was embedded in daily
practice and it would give me the opportunity to learn that to be a teacher you
need to be teachable and constantly reinvent yourself. Firstly because , as we
worked in pairs (from kindergarten to 5th grade we had two teachers in the
classroom one who speaks only in English and the other who speaks
Portuguese), we had to plan our classes together, to support each other during
the activities not only concerning disciplinary problems with the kids, but also
by sharing knowledge and expertise throughout the day. Besides, by teaching
with an interdisciplinary approach, we had the opportunity to develop classes
and projects integrating other disciplines. Consequently, while working in a
class with a History teacher, we were supporting, questioning and evaluating
each other’s practice, from different disciplinary perspectives, but with the
same goal: to maximize our impact on our learners.

I firmly believe that the mentoring process I have been experiencing-

sometimes as a mentor and sometimes as a mentee- has had a profound
impact on my personal and professional life, for I have become more and more
teachable and I am reinventing myself every day. It also fosters the 21st
century skills I want to develop in my learners, i.e. collaboration,
communication, creativity and critical thinking. Most importantly, this kind of
mentoring assured me that to be a teacher you need to be a lifelong learner.