When Jon Krakauer published Into Thin Air about the Everest disaster of 1996, the world suddenly became interested in Mount Everest and climbing. And related to my topic—guides—the world also suddenly took an interest in mountain guides and the ethics of guiding. People who had never set foot on a mountain were now discussing whether various Everest guides had failed or succeeded ethically. In one particularly controversial case, Krakauer accused guide Anatoli Boukreev of failing to care properly for his clients. Boukreev wrote his own book, The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest, to offer a defense. Who should we believe? The American Alpine Club later honored Boukreev for saving the lives of several climbers who were wandering around in a blizzard on Everest’s South Col. Krakauer may not have served Boukreev well in Into Thin Air, but he did help raise the question that I want us to explore here: What do guides do?

In the Editorial with which we began this issue, we introduced one image of the guide as a lady holding up a flag in an airport so her tourist clients could follow her. This guide might be shepherding her flock of tourists with matching duffle bags (and possibly matching levels of confusion) toward the correct counter or to the right charter bus, and she might be reminding a few stragglers to pick up their luggage from the carousel. I also think of a guide named Patrick who drove some teacher colleagues and me on a safari in Kenya after we had worked for two weeks with Kenyan teachers. I recall Patrick talking on his radio to other safari drivers, because they were wondering where the lions were. We looked at each other in amazement as he spoke these exact words into his microphone: “. . . just east of that big tree on the top of the hill.” At another time, and faced with a herd of elephants coming our way, we also once suggested to Patrick—I’m sure with some urgency in our voices—that perhaps now might be a good time to drive away.

As it turns out, guides do a lot of different things. They point people to the right bus. They help them get to the top of Everest . . . sometimes by pulling. They find lions. We can all tolerate different levels of uncertainty in our travels. With or without GPS, we all have different degrees of willingness to find our own way and to make our own mistakes. And we all bring different levels of expertise to our travels. I have climbed for decades and never hired a guide, but I cannot imagine climbing Everest by simply getting a permit with my buddies and flying to Nepal. The Kenyan government has made it quite difficult for Westerners to go on safari without hiring a guide. In my view, this is a wise approach given that most people don’t want their Kenyan safari to become the last thing they do on their bucket list.

So what is a guide teacher? What do guide teachers do? Not to work my examples too hard, but I think they probably do the metaphorical equivalents of all the kinds of work I have listed above. Some teacher guides help new teachers with the most basic tasks. For example, think about how easy it is for the veteran teacher to manage attendance compared to the inexperienced teacher. Regarding this simple, but absolutely essential matter, the guide teacher might help by offering any number of suggestions about how to remember to take attendance, how to simplify the process, or how to make it part of the ritual of welcoming students into the classroom. Travelers and adventurers might enjoy some feeling of superiority when they see a group of confused tourists being herded through an airport; but they should perhaps recall some of the confusion they experienced when they first traveled. And veteran teachers should perhaps remember how complicated some straightforward processes seemed when they began their careers.

What might be the educational equivalent of a big Himalayan mountain? And how would someone guide a teacher who decided to take on such a challenge? For some teachers, it might be applying for a classroom in a different grade or at a different school with all the adjustments implied in that change. For others, it might be applying for an administrative post or launching the quest for an advanced degree. Many teachers start to think about another degree or some other new professional achievement in the second half of their first decade of teaching or early in their second decade. Where do they turn when they start to consider these kinds of challenges? In my view, they turn to a guide—to a veteran teacher colleague from their own school or another school.

And what about Patrick, the guide that found the lions and helped me avoid an unwanted encounter with the elephants? What is the equivalent in teaching? To be precise, Patrick guided my colleagues and me for several days; we were his clients. He learned about the work we had been doing with teachers and we learned about his family and the work he did in Nairobi when he was not driving clients on safari. At the end of our days together, I felt like Patrick had taken care of us, not just guided us. And when I think about Patrick’s work as a metaphor, I realize that while all teachers need people to encourage them, teachers in their first decade especially need mentors who will walk with them day to day and not just when they take on Everest.

When I first encountered Erik Erikson’s work on the stages of human development as an undergraduate, he made sense to me, but less in an existential way and more along the lines of “I need to know Erikson to pass this course.” When I began teaching, I had a mentor who gave me significant help in sorting through my first couple years in the classroom. But I saw no connection between Erikson’s work and the help my mentor gave; I still didn’t really get Erikson’s stages. Later, while teaching developmental psychology, I finally found myself in Erikson’s work. Recall that he believed people at every stage of life had a developmental task. In his account, the task of adults in their middle years is generativity, and those who refuse that task will face stagnation. By generativity, Erikson meant that we give to society, to our families, and to those with whom we work.

For those who are called to teach and who wake up one morning to discover that they turned forty the day before, generativity implies guiding younger teachers into their profession, helping them unpack the teaching gifts that God has given them. Patrick, our guide in the Masai Mara basin, knew what he wanted to show us, but he also asked us what we wanted to do and see. My suspicion about teacher guides is that they have a quite clear idea of what inexperienced teachers need to know. How could they have taught this long and not know what’s important about teaching? But success in guiding new teachers implies listening to their questions as well, and letting them say, “This is what I would really like to know,” or “This is what I would like to try,” or “This is what I want to do next.”

I began teaching on the Tuesday after Labor Day in 1975. In the forty academic years since that day, I have worked hard to figure out how teaching works; it remains on my professional bucket list, so to speak, and I don’t have it checked off yet. Right on Erik Erikson’s schedule, I found that by my fortieth birthday, I was increasingly involved in mentoring younger adults. Now, at the start of my fifth decade as an educator, I continue to teach pre-service teachers, but I also work with school leaders and professors. I worked with the writers of the other articles that appear in this issue. I have served as their guide to help them with their first magazine articles. They wanted to write; one’s first magazine article is hardly an Everest, but it is a significant challenge and while success is never guaranteed, having a guide certainly increases the possibility of success.

So my challenge to you, my readers, is this: if your fortieth birthday is in sight (from either direction), then it is time to start thinking about how you will mentor and guide the next generation of teachers, some of whom work in the same building as you. If you are not already taking interns from a teacher-training program, then I strongly recommend that you begin. Do you have a signature teaching strategy or signature unit that you could describe in a workshop on professional days? If so, develop that workshop and offer it to colleagues in other schools. Tell your principal that you are willing to mentor new staff members. If Erikson is right, the alternative to such mentoring is stagnation. We have all met stagnant teachers. For me, the sobering and saddest thing about many of them is that their stagnation resulted from a number of small choices they made along the way, especially in their middle years. Pardon my parental tone here; I don’t quite mean to say, “Snap out of it.” But I do mean to say that there are ways to remain professionally vital to the day you retire, and guiding younger teachers is one of those ways.

I end with this. For three years, I served on the Council on Alberta Teaching Standards. One of my delightful responsibilities there was to help oversee the Excellence in Teaching Awards program, through which about two dozen Alberta teachers per year were recognized for their amazing work. In my three years with the program, I read about six hundred nomination packages. This theme runs through most of the nominations I read: The outstanding teachers who had reached the appropriate age were acting as guides to younger colleagues. I do not want to make Erikson say what he never said, but I agree with him that the alternative to generativity is stagnation. Our students do not want grouchy, stagnant teachers. But they deserve and they love to have wise and vital seasoned teachers. One of the ways we can become those teachers is by guiding others. Start now.

Ken Badley lives in Calgary, Alberta, and teaches in the doctoral program in education at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon. Ken taught for four years at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto and for nine years at Strathcona Christian Academy in Sherwood Park, Alberta.