Presidential Address 2025-Mentoring Across the Professional Spectrum: Doing the Fundamental Work to Get to the Next Level.

03Original abstract

To introduce myself, I am a professor of education at Providence College and have taught mathematics to students across the spectrum, from elementary to high school. I like to prepare – I enjoy preparing for lessons, research, gardening, and working on projects in my garage. I dream of organizing, building, fixing, and problem-solving. I dream of making the complex simple, dynamic, and durable. I love applied mathematics, physics, logic, and, above all, teaching. In teaching, as in mentoring, you can do your best stunt work co-creating a community where the learners carry the weight of learning, and you as a mentor, create the ropes course designed to challenge them to set the rigor and build the ramp. The best mentoring spaces are teaching and learning spaces; they are dynamic, movable classrooms in the community.In our association, the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (AAIDD) has a high-leverage interconnected set of activities: research, policy, and practice forming a perfect triangle, a robust foundation from which we tap into our members' expertise across all work involving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). What I love about our space is that we see the value of everyone willing to work for this population, whether a teacher, faculty member, researcher, district support worker, dentist, physician, lawyer, judge, provider, politician, etcetera. We applaud cross-training and shun silos when we are together.Today, I will be walking us through three sets of three ideas on how one can mentor across the professional spectrum from mentee to mentor: Grounding in good habits, principles in mentoring, and leading across the spectrum—all of these ideas apply to the work you will engage with. Whether you are a new hire, new student, old hand, or senior mentor, these all apply.First, we must engage in the right way. Over the past 25 years, in my classroom, it has not mattered who you are or when you took my class at T’siya Elementary and Middle School, Highland or Cibola High School, the University of New Mexico, or Providence College.I have three rules of engagement, from which I do not deviate. I will work with you on the rest if you do these things:If you can be on time every class, I will get you on a path to success.We will not rest for the entirety of the class. We will have fun, and we will work.We will focus on the present and work without distractions, which exponentially increases your uptake of information.With these three in place as bedrock, the minds of those in the class calm, their amygdala winds down and stops firing on “doom loops.” At this point, students know that I will deal with and help them with anything else, including cursing, extreme emotions, meltdowns, and mistakes; we just keep going!Each time we face our work grounded in reality without fear or anger, we progress, learn something new, and slowly become our best selves. These choices to engage with challenges make for a bright future for those with IDD; they also connect, support, and energize everyone on your team.We reclaim the term teacher-researcher as John Dewey understood it (Dewey, 1916): the school is the laboratory of education, a place of dynamic forces at play and fertile ground for both creating ideas and testing them before he left Chicago. We must reclaim the truth that teachers are researchers; they are the ultimate creatives, processing the discoveries in real-time of 20 to 30 minds who are themselves simultaneously accessing the lesson from multiple vantage points, finding the signal through the noise. Teaching is some of the most rigorous and highly taxing work I have ever done. It integrates AAIDD’s perfect prime of research, policy, and practice that can only be divisible by itself.I once went on a deep dive into research on how emotion—and its pathway through the brain—can help with the uptake of new knowledge and skills, and how to use emotion to support teaching and learning higher-level mathematics for people with significant disabilities. That one single project, steeped in triggering content with advanced practices, hardwired the learning deep in the minds of my students so they could later remember, manipulate the memory, and use it to solve problems.I found that with moderate triggering, and in facing their fears, I could get students to use the information in class. My students would not stop talking about the applications for significant and profound triggering and would bring the idea home and tell their parents. For example, they might say to stop going to the bodega for toothpaste because it costs three times the amount per ounce as the store just a few blocks further, that the pawnshop takes them to the cleaners, or that the huckster at the state fair will sell you a hot tub for your apartment and never install it (these are real things meant to pull you toward the mathematics and give you a reason right now to learn the content). We need to bring all students into the tent and enlarge it. Best practice is to help people get fired up, acknowledge humanity, and above all, let them do work that has meaning.Many people think what they are doing is a form of tough love, and then realize midstream that something is off. I have been there. I have been too caring and not given enough structure, and as a result the person became privileged, enabled, and less than who they could be. I have also erred on the other side of this ratio, where the individual shuts down, cannot hear what I am saying and becomes less than their potential. The sweet spot is equal proportions— toughness without love is mean and cruel, and love without expectations and accountability lowers the bar and insults their intelligence.I'm a parent of two tremendous and brave kids, artistic and soulful, stubborn like their dad. They live in my dreams and daylong internal dialogues. I worry for them and am always proud of them. I seek to bring out the best in them while showing them what discipline and dedication look like. I try all the time and fail all the time; sometimes, the light emerges, and I see not only that are they going to be ok, but that they are thriving.When they are not, we talk, work out issues, set expectations and boundaries, and have the dreaded “Triple D”: difficult dialogues with dad. A play on words and rooted in an anti-establishment response to my college's mission on difficult dialogues, where people pose as curious, pretend to listen, and then move on, having the same opinion that they had before. In my family, the Triple D is a real, vulnerable, and heart-wrenching conversation where we all empty the chamber and talk about all the issues. At the end of these conversations, we leave exhausted but united in caring for each other in productive ways, and this later becomes part of our inside jokes, “remember that time when…?” The difficult dialogues provide a time to re-center and return to the good things we have built as a team.All great things begin in complexity, and the master mentor understands this process and can make the complex simple and actionable. Simple is indeed elegant, yet the path to elegance is sometimes overwhelming. A skilled mentor can guide us, set appropriate weight for us to carry, expose us to complexity, and work with us so we do the work, discover, and learn.Was it serendipity, building a disposition for doing the work to get to me the next level? Before getting to the next level of their careers, some notable figures were manual laborers. Abraham Lincoln was a logger and rail splitter. Edward James Olmos was a furniture mover, which supported his flailing acting career until he joined the set of Miami Vice. Booker T. Washington worked in the fields and as a janitor at Hampton before he became a student there. Manual labor has taught me:Manual labor and movement have always supported me in facing those demons; they have shaped me in ways I am forever grateful for. It is still a place where I go to work off negative energy, anger, resentment, and disappointment. Where I find my center, build, create, shape, and channel my energy. I was a junior in high school, had worked many jobs by then, and had just left a tedious role pumping gas at the local gas station. A friend told me an arborist was hiring laborers and that I would get along well. So, I applied and was invited to the back lot of a farm and told to rototill the garden. Then I was told to use the splitter and split firewood. Then I was asked if I liked working outside, and then, quite simply, I was hired. I was asked to split wood because that is the backbone of winter work. It is both monotonous and draining: splitting, loading, and delivering cords of wood in between snowfall (and plowing) and the rare clearing of lots for homes.Manual labor trains you for monotony, for boredom, and for constantly repeating the same core actions across many different terrains and situations. It was excellent training for academic work; I was carrying a straight C-average then. Manual labor shaped me, made me stick with something well beyond the point where I wanted to go, and after every day I could go home knowing I accomplished something tangible. The process of working from 7:30 to lunch and lunch to the drive back to my car were great micro work cycles that allowed me to see day to day progress.Years later, I found my calling in a moment of clarity. In mid-December—cold but not completely frozen ground—a recent slushy mix froze over the night before on a densely-forested lot we were hired to clear-cut. We were running a skeleton crew, and I was sent out alone to drop trees, load the truck, and run loads to the woodlot. I was given the day to do what I could. There was a steep slope on the lot facing the road, and I began dropping trees up the hill, dicing up the tree, and taking truckloads to the wood lot.As the day wore on, the temperature rose, softening the ground. In the afternoon, I squared up to drop a tree, cut my notch, and started on the backside as I have done hundreds, if not thousands, of times. When the saw kicked and rotated, I lost my footing, and the saw hit my leg, grabbed hold of something on me, and fell to the side, pulling me with it, sliding down the hill. I did not want to look. I saw coveralls in shreds, and my metal chaps wrapped perfectly around the saw blade. With a sigh of relief, I figured it was time to pack up, drop the truck off, and drive home. I was shaken but not processing well. I called a friend of mine, home from Georgetown, to get a drink. I told him we had much to catch up on, and that the most jacked-up thing had just happened to me.When I arrived to pick him up his mom asked if I would join them for dinner, and I obliged. We had meatballs. I told them the story, and his mom, the director of social workers for the district, said, ‘Hey, Anthony, you ever think of working inside, at least for the winter? There is an opening at a school that I think you might understand. Maybe good until spring. If you don’t like it, you can go back to the tree company. Think about it.’I decided to apply. I told my boss I could continue to plow driveways, I just wanted a break from treework for the winter, but that I would be back. I signed on with the Danbury Public Schools in Connecticut as a paraprofessional teacher at an elementary school on a hill above the city dump (which was on fire during my year there) in a self-contained district-wide program in a class where half of the students were diagnosed with IDD, and half with Emotional Disturbance. It was not an optimal mix, and I hated it. Every Friday, I questioned why I would go back on Monday. Every Monday, I realized that there was something good about the work and the teaching, and I could get to Friday. On and on. I was sure that come spring, I would leave. Then I felt like I had to stay till June to finish the year.Then one kid, Pao—who seemed to hate school than I did when I was his and who never the school me a on the all up with my on it. There was a of me with a (which I did not have at the and out of my and it I it, and up for the time as a My times in when I saw an school year form signed by his I now had and and I had a lot of work to I never and later I am still making a in this work, on the a place of great work, and my is a given to the when a at In our work, we are all or something in this we are all and must hold to we have to stay on and our is not the time to place weight on our and to the mission and is you have in the do but for your work is If is the day you have space for in as much as you do not have to to other time but can just be a good person who can if you would like. be teacher best practices, and core in an that the the best empty like a and the class engage in and they themselves to find multiple to a when it is time to the students to each as they the I have the of are all and if they did not get the but their at all, or their of from to we are That we are the learning, the the is all that If we practice to with distractions, the will of students in my were not of that was their I to not the high testing to my teaching, and my was their I told them that are and are but one of many for the and that if they just to their would of they had to do was and get to teachers and our work is to a community that for and on the learning path while with an where we are all working toward the same in To a space with the of with each other and the and that we all have something to bring to the is a for time with do not be the In our the most difficult person to and the it difficult for that person to do that by making them a place at the through work, and not their have too much work to a with a it to the people we mentor, and for to engage with and who carry real In a time of we need a to work, and the one who and The one who can The one who up in state they are in and to be the and not the The one who will hold space so can be have every reason in the to be and now is not a a time of to a of time by is the time when those who have always been most and most are on, and having their out from them. than for we can and work.We are We must We must into the with all our energy. the of our and our difficult our work. it be the to our we are built for of when I was a person for which was run by and were and which was about both just like the from in the in the to everyone who by to out with and the between and I was the best or person on given the I don’t know if I can ever you or the with all Where you know I fire the next he how he and I was like I could on the same from day to I to the into the and not and run my like everyone to get in the was a who started the program in the I was those they work they and they help out the about the but he a good program when he saw the community was always the of what we were for. had his he had a around him at all but he that having a was the best thing for To be and do real work. I this teacher come in and talk about the the and I also saw who his teaching people with saw he saw and he in his It would still be a while before I saw the light and to the but there was but one with a lot of and with was to with through I had a who from to the who had a love for American had a and a for that would be I that my when he and you to what you had made a and how much he by how and how the how logic, and that it could channel in ways that never could. its and started his with and them with that your was not hill of when he saw what was in your of his made us all face our when he some of them. when you did the in the and the because he saw it in his had a with who our and was on the I would talk to him before during one of the I had to through and during where he would keep me his was his us the and the the words from a who could be made us all would be about not or saying that I to run and hit people with In my of school, when my was in I was by both my and his as a who was I to be and I realized that if I the person in of me, I could find stop until the On my you could hear him in an of words for me to run it outside, which I not The words began in the when I took the I liked and I to work my much like I straight until I around the 30 when the it became a then a then some people know that it was his all my boss of a tree I was on the ground. I had just one of my jobs a I was up at my work, a of I my and a of words through my I around to face the I had less than a to to a tree in my I was to move about a to my right before the tree down on my left a with an than a my through my and me from the the response was a in my to the by a lot of and my and a I had My who us in did not have it for us, so he had to out of his as well. the a and and and but was I took a off, which I had never done and then I to work to do as much as the next while I could not to not work. I had and so I up well before by a because that is what you do in manual do not have the of manual workers do this well beyond their some do it until they I know that amount of work I do now can to yet it is this that I still channel I it, not in a but in who I am in my one can me if I never to I will to those I work with around at the end of my and I am fields that our run for in every of or or the trees which the great and of my There is great great those of and willing to do the work, much like our It is time to see them for who they our great and the best of next to listen, and support their because the part of our as is when we with the the the and the one who and is in have much work to do and much to be for. I am and of that all of you are with me and for our I you for all the people now and still to face the with love, and I those who can and with an work is the most and is taking place right we see from in a community that would be to be up at a to and who they are as a It is their to up, to be both and have a that on I that every one of my will some form of movement to so we will end with a a and some want to and for their and in finding the signal through the in this you to all the in my career who have me to realize my and made this work and

Intellectual and developmental disabilities, 2025 · doi:10.1352/1934-9556-63.5.363