It was 1996 and I had taken my son, an ardent and competitive junior golfer, to see Vancouver’s first PGA event at Northview Golf and Country Club in Surrey.
Many of the golf world’s stars were there, and as we walked from the parking lot to the first tee, we passed the practice green where the iconic figure of Payne Stewart, complete with his signature cap and plus-fours was, with his caddy beside him, practising 15-foot putts. They were all missing the hole by a hair, and Stewart, who had by then won 11 PGA tour events, including three majors, turned to his caddy.
“What am I doing?” he said.
The caddy, without speaking, made a minor adjustment because Stewart was holding his right elbow too far from his body.
Then the putts began to drop one after the other, and I thought of my years of teaching, alone in a classroom (except for 25 or so kids) with no one to ask: “What am I doing?”
Terence Rattigan, one of England’s most popular mid-20th-century dramatists, described how Laurence Olivier, arguably the greatest actor of his or any time, “built his performance slowly and with immense application from a mass of tiny details, often in consultation with his director.”
Olivier, as fellow actor Dustin Hoffman described him, “was a guy who held King Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth in his head,” but one who still sought experienced advice as he developed the details of his craft.
The point of all this is that even the best in the world seek and accept advice from an experienced colleague. Stewart, Olivier and even Hoffman did not achieve excellence in isolation from good advice.
So now, as a result of the Supreme Court decision restoring class size and composition to 2002 levels, it might be a good time to revitalize the New Teacher Mentoring Project, a joint initiative of the B.C. Teachers’ Federation, the University of British Columbia and the B.C. School Superintendents’ Association.
Participants in the program ranged in experience from first year to teachers returning to work after an extended absence. The idea was to develop a more formalized and integrated system of support for inducting, developing and retaining teachers in B.C., according to the BCTF website.
A seed grant from the Ministry of Education was first approved in the spring of 2012 to provide the project with funds to develop structured mentoring programs in school districts that did not yet have formal mentorship or had lost their programs. In 2014, the ministry committed to funding the New Teacher Mentoring Project for two more years and at its height 29 school districts were involved.
According to BCTF sources, the project is currently in abeyance because of the difficulty of establishing ongoing funding.
Now, with the Supreme Court decision making it necessary for B.C. school districts to find as many as 300 or more additional teachers, a revitalized and refunded mentorship program is definitely an idea whose time has come.
Some of the new teachers will be graduates fresh from teacher-training systems with little classroom experience. Others will be teachers working as teachers-on-call or people returning to the system after an extended absence.
They’d all benefit from guidance from an experienced colleague.
A similar mentorship program for teachers is alive and well in Washington state.
Called the Best Educator Support Team, this program, funded through the office of the Washington state Superintendent of Public Instruction, provides support for new teachers, but also for teachers new to a school district through a comprehensive induction and mentoring program.
Many factors contribute to a student’s academic performance, but there is a boatload of research suggesting that, among school-related factors, teachers matter most. When it comes to student performance on reading and math tests, a teacher is estimated to have two to three times the impact of any other school factor.
Simply dropping 300 teachers into the B.C. public school system without a fully funded safety net such as NTMP or BEST would exacerbate the blunders that created the current situation in the first place.
Teaching, like Stewart’s golf or Olivier’s or Hoffman’s acting, is a highly individualized activity, but is also one that does not benefit from being practised in isolation in the absence of thoughtful and experienced support.
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
