NEWS A Texas Team Ag Ed Publication
Paying
it
June 2018
Forward
Michael Meadows, Simms
I’m writing this article just after attending a year-end meeting with our association’s professional mentors. As many of you know, this year VATAT embarked on a pilot professional mentoring program intended to provide support, advice, help, and encouragement to early career ag teachers. This idea had been discussed for a long time before launching this past year. Our records indicated that approximately half of our members have five years or less experience in our profession, and we noticed many were getting out of teaching after only a year or two. After doing some research, we discovered this was largely due to feeling overwhelmed with the responsibilities that come with teaching ag. All of us know how demanding our jobs can be and how fast-paced our lives can become throughout the course of the school year. We also found that more are entering the profession through alternative certification programs and haven’t had the same preparation as those of us who came through a more traditional teacher preparation program at a university. Along with the trend of having more openings than highly-qualified applicants, our association decided to act. The overall success and sustainability of agricultural education depends on quality, well-rounded, local programs that positively impact students and prepares them for the future. We have the structure in place to do this, but it ultimately depends
on local teachers to implement and/or maintain a quality, wellrounded program. Those of us who have been in the profession a while know this is challenging, but possible with the proper resources, support, and structure at the local level. Our professional mentors- recently retired, very successful ag teachers- help provide these resources, support, and structure. This de-briefing meeting was intended to receive feedback from our mentors which will be used to increase the effectiveness of the program. After listening to our mentors, I am convinced this is a service that can and will be very beneficial to our members and our profession. Those that retire represent years of valuable knowledge and experience that could really help an early career teacher. We are tapping this valuable resource to help less experienced teachers “get their feet under themselves” and hopefully avoid some of the mistakes that all of us have made. As a result, we hope to improve and/or maintain quality programs by retaining good, high quality ag teachers. The VATAT exists to provide benefits to members. This mentoring program targets early career teachers but benefits all of us by increasing the quality of local programs, which will help cement our program for the future. We could not offer this particular member benefit without the work of our mentors. The
association pays them to help cover expenses and time, but we could never pay them the value of their experience, knowledge, and desire to see agricultural education flourish. The work they are doing inspires and motivates me. Their comments during our meeting proved to me once again that teaching ag is just not a job- it “gets in your blood” and you never really stop being an ag teacher. The willingness to help, the love of helping develop another person, the readiness to put in the extra hours, the desire to continually work for improvement, these are the characteristics and passion of an ag teacher. Those characteristics don’t disappear or go away when you retire, they are embedded in. Continue on page 2