Liberate + Neglect
When a mentor does not offer enough guidance
Mary + Matt
At age 23, I had been teaching for a little over a year. My school and my teacher training program wisely offered mentor teachers to those of us who were new teachers. In addition to the supervisors from the program who visited our schools for periodic observations, each of us had an onsite mentor.
Until my mentor left.
At the end of my first year, my mentor took another job. The mentorship was supposed to continue through most of my second year. The program and my school agreed that another administrator would take over my mentoring. While Mary*1 was a very experienced educator, she was also stretched impossibly thin. In that second year, we met infrequently at a time when I really needed a mentor.
Destiny* was a student in my seventh-grade class. She was bright, mature in many ways, and could work hard when she wanted to. She also got in some trouble. She responded quickly and assertively to any and all perceived instances of disrespect, whether they came from her peers or adults in the building. While I never saw her initiate conflict by bullying or trying to harm another student, she frequently escalated any interaction when she felt disrespected.
The result was that when Destiny blew up—at me, at other teachers, at some of her peers—I wrote up these infractions as described in the school’s handbook. As students accumulated these write-ups—called Referrals—a series of consequences came down, including detentions after school and sometimes on Saturdays, in-school suspensions, and out-of-school suspensions. Eventually, the handbook said that expulsion should be considered.
Given Destiny’s consistent challenges, I really needed a mentor that year to help me understand not just school policies, but how to think about and address the very human circumstances that cause infractions to come up in the first place. Unfortunately neither Mary nor I made it a point to connect regularly that second year. So I did what other novices do: I applied rules and policies as written in the school’s handbook, without enough thought around the student, what she needed, and the kinds of situations that we were trying to address.
Mary and I met less frequently as the year went on. At the same time, Destiny’s Referral write-ups accumulated. While I noted the obviously accumulating pattern, I focused more on each individual infraction and never stopped to fully question the reasons behind this pattern or its potential big picture consequences.
Until one spring day, a pivotal moment came: I walked into school to meet my class, and saw that Destiny was not in full compliance with the school’s dress code. I asked if we could speak off to the side, away from her classmates, in the hopes of avoiding a confrontation. She very publicly and demonstrably blew me off. I told her I was putting in another Referral write-up as a consequence.
It was only at the end of the day, when I went to drop the form off, that the office coordinator and I realized it was Destiny’s twelfth Referral of the year. According to the handbook, the next step would be a meeting with Destiny’s parents to discuss suspension and, possibly, expulsion from the school. The office coordinator called Destiny’s mother to schedule a meeting.
The next morning, I arrived at school to find her father waiting for me in the office. He was clearly upset, but composed, saying “They told me you’re going to expel her over a dress code issue?” I was surprised to find him there. I stammered out that the issue was “A pattern of behavior” and not just about the final incident. He told me he could not accept that, and insisted that he, Mary, and I meet to discuss the situation.
Mary and I met privately for the first time in months. As she learned about Destiny’s escalating behavior over the course of the year, she alternated between admonishing me for not coming to her and herself for not meeting with me. I recounted all of the policies in the handbook I thought corresponded to the individual incidents. She mentioned all of the checkpoints at which I should have contacted her and Destiny’s parents to discuss the issue. At that moment we both realized we had allowed the situation to go unaddressed for far too long.
I have written before about how part of great mentoring is giving mentees the freedom to struggle and apply their mentor’s lessons. Mentors pull back the curtain, show mentees the hidden knowledge of experts, and then give them the freedom to apply that knowledge. But mentees first need the guidance—to know what the main lessons are—as well as feedback throughout the process to see where they are implementing lessons appropriately and where they are missing the mark.
There is a difference between freedom to apply the mentor’s lessons and mutual neglect of the mentorship. Just as there is a difference between understanding what is in a handbook or a text book and what it means to apply that information to real situations.
Mentors need not only to understand their craft, but also the difference between how an expert and a novice would apply that knowledge. Research on medical doctors has explored how experts and novices think and solve problems differently.
Novices often engage in what researchers call backward reasoning: They begin with hypotheses (often specific or narrow ones) and work backwards to see if a given situation fits that hypothesis. They start with the diagnosis from the textbook and work backwards to patient and their symptoms.
Experts engage in forward reasoning: They take a data-driven approach that starts with a patient’s symptoms, identify relevant patterns, and come to a conclusion2. Experts’ generate fewer, broader hypotheses because they start from broad observations of clinical data. They use less jargon from the textbook. Their recognition of broad patterns helps them understand what information and hypotheses to keep and which to disregard3.
A novice needs their expert mentor to help them engage in a cycle of learning, application, and feedback. As a novice teacher, I needed someone to help me think beyond immediate situations and reflect on the bigger picture, or what neuroscientists call transcendent thinking. I knew the handbook and my education textbooks, but could not see the very human forest for the behavioral trees.
Mary and I met with Destiny’s mother. It was the first time the three of us had spoken all year. Mary and I didn’t prepare together ahead of time on what to do in these kinds of situations, or even how we planned to handle this one. She just told me to come with ideas for next steps for Destiny.
I started by explaining what the handbook said about repeated incidents and the need to consider serious consequences. Destiny’s mother, rightly, said she felt like we were giving up on Destiny, and said she would have expected more communication if the situation was so serious. We charted a temporary path forward for the rest of that year, including Destiny completing work at home for a period of time. She returned the following year for eighth grade.
This was the first meeting like this I attended in my career. Mary and I never discussed possible root causes of Destiny’s behavior, how to handle similar behavior from students at this age, or ways to prepare for difficult conversations with parents. I knew the handbook, but not how to handle the impact of rigidly applying that handbook, or what to do when write-ups or Referrals don’t address the problem. During and after that meeting, handbooks and policies seemed unimportant, and I was left wondering what Mary or I could have done leading up to that meeting to keep it from happening in the first place.
In retrospect, Mary and I both fell short. I did not do enough to seek out my mentor’s guidance, and Mary did not offer enough feedback or support. Like many novices, I looked only at the descriptions in the handbook and worked backwards, rather than working forward from the challenges Destiny was having in school and understanding the bigger picture of what issues we needed to help her address. An experienced mentor was there to help me, but neither the mentor nor I did enough to take advantage of that expertise. That’s not autonomy, that’s neglect of the relationship.
*Mary and Destiny are referred to using pseudonyms.
Patel, V. L., & Groen, G. J. (1986). Knowledge based solution strategies in medical reasoning. Cognitive science, 10(1), 91-116.
Cuthbert, L., Du Boulay, B., & Teather, D. (1999). Expert/Novice Differences in Diagnostic Medical Cognition: A Review of the Literature. University of Sussex Cognitive Science Research Paper