Who Inspires You? Expressing Teacher-Mentor Gratitude

This morning I opened my email and there was a wonderful surprise waiting for me. A teacher I worked with a decade ago had emailed me to say thank you for working with her all those years ago. She had gone on to become a literacy coach, and then a staff developer with a wonderful group of my colleagues on the west coast. She wanted me to know that she still remembered how I helped her during her first year teaching.

What a gift! It’s a rare thing that teachers get to find out whatever became of their students–and even more rare that teachers of adults ever hear from their students again. Occasionally, I will bump into a teacher I worked with long ago, or I’ll get a message via social media, or if I’m really lucky, I might get a heartfelt email like the one I opened this morning.

I encourage you all to reach out to someone who has been a mentor or an inspiration to you as a teacher and let them know how much you appreciate them: a professor, a colleague, a principal, a literacy coach, a staff developer. When you share your gratitude for someone’s support, you give them energy and inspiration to keep on going.

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6 thoughts on “Who Inspires You? Expressing Teacher-Mentor Gratitude”

What a beautiful post, Beth! The TWT team inspires me. I’m going to be tweeting to some folks who deserve shout outs with a link to this post.

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We all stand on the shoulders of writing teachers who came before us. I agree with Christa that we should routinely write letters or notes of gratitude to those we learn from.

A perfect post for this month! 🙂

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Reblogged this on Educational Gems.

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We wrote letters to our mailman this month. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to write a letter of gratitude to someone every month? A year of gratitude writing. I like it!

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Love the call for educators to reach out to the positive influences on their life and career…I am connecting to what I share with my student writers:

Writers need to hear what they are doing right as much, if not more so, than what they have done wrong.

It is so true for teachers. Reach out and tell others what is right about them, their classroom, their impact on you. We can’t get enough of that, can we?

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