New principal Linda Daniels would look forward to those monthly meetings at the Waffle House restaurant in Venice, Fla. Over cups of coffee and warm cinnamon buns, she would share her stresses and triumphs with Jerry Kaplan, a retired principal with 25 years' experience.
There was plenty to share, too. Daniels presided over the newly created Cranberry Elementary School, which then consisted of 43 portable classrooms on another school's campus in fast-growing Northport, Fla. On top of dealing with faculty politics and disgruntled parents, Daniels was still hiring staff and buying furniture for the school's new building, which was under construction at a different site.
"It was fun. At the same time it was a challenge," recalls Daniels. "Being a new principal—you're basically winging it."
But having Kaplan ready to listen or offer advice was a godsend. "It was nice to have someone say, ‘I liked the way you handled that’—or to hear that all principals have dealt with a certain situation. I always walked away from those meetings reinvigorated," says Daniels. She also found that talking with her mentor helped her balance work and family life.
Now, one year later, Daniels is in Cranberry Elementary's spanking new building. She asserts that last year's mentoring sessions helped lay the ground-work for her school's climate of caring, which includes sensitivity to the needs of the school staff and the wider community. For example, Daniels notes that staff and students gathered supplies for a neighboring school hit by Hurricane Charley in August. On the academic side, Daniels also points out that her Title I school made its federal and state education targets, which gave it a grade A in Florida's school ranking system.
New Demands on Leadership
Daniels received her mentoring through Sarasota County Public Schools' Bank of America Leadership Center. At a time when greater performance demands are being placed on teachers and administrators, and many teachers are reaching retirement age, schools are turning to mentoring programs to ensure that expert practices and new staff stick around for the long haul.
Interest is growing in various types of one-on-one assistance, including mentoring, executive coaching, and school-based staff development coaches, because educators recognize that teachers and schools face complex challenges, says Dennis Sparks, executive director of the National Staff Development Council (NSDC).
"The old leadership model—in other words, just being a manager—doesn't work," contends Wendy Katz, director of Sarasota's Leadership Center, which was financed by a $100,000 grant from Bank of America. "Now school leaders have to know teaching inside and out. They have to know best practices. They have to know how to structure a school to support teaching and learning. They have to know about professional development for ongoing learning—job-embedded, collaborative types of learning."
Sarasota, a large school district employing 2,500 staff members and serving 41,000 students, has expanded its leadership program to include 29 aspiring leaders who will be mentored by assistant principals in a two-year program called Linkages. Katz and three other staff members will also work with aspiring leaders by conducting mock interviews, analyzing case studies of typical school problems, and helping potential administrators fashion resumes, all using the standards set by the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium.
Assistant principals who take on the role of mentor benefit along with the individuals they help, Katz emphasizes. Reflecting on their practice is "the highest level of learning" because they have to synthesize what they know and gauge their own level of understanding before they can share it with others, she says.
Along with mentoring, new principals in the Sarasota program gain support from a transition team. This team includes the mentor, another principal who acts as a peer coach, a teacher leader, and a parent leader, all of whom meet with the new principal three times in the first three months of the school year.
"The whole purpose of this is to help with the transition of new leaders and ensure their success," says Katz. The most important issue for new principals is building relationships—fast. Among the strategies principals learn in the Sarasota program are finding the key players in the school and securing some "early wins" so that the community immediately sees benefits and begins to trust the new principal. "It's also important for the new principal to realize that old strategies that may have worked in another school may not work in this new situation—every school is very different, every culture is very different," she says.
Imparting Data-Driven Culture
Mentors, whether for administrators or teachers, should be well-respected educators, say experts. School and district leaders ought to select mentors as "embodiments of the desired future of teaching and learning" for a school or district, says the NSDC's Sparks. The selection, training, and support of mentors is crucial if a school is seeking positive change or wants to sustain an already successful teaching and learning environment.
For Community Consolidated School District 15 in Palatine, Ill., continuity is a big issue. The district won the 2003 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for Excellence, a prestigious award given to businesses and organizations that compete in a rigorous evaluation process. In recent years, District 15 has cultivated a data-driven culture that involves administrators, teachers, and students in learning how to use specific tools and techniques for collecting information and then using that information to set goals. Mentors play a key role in imparting that culture.
This year, District 15 hired 105 new teachers, some of them novices and some merely new to the district, mostly to replace 70 retiring teachers. Both the newly minted teachers and the new-to-the-district teachers are paired with mentors, who are paid an extra $1,059 annually for work with novice teachers, and half that sum for work with experienced teachers. Mentors, who are appointed by principals, take a two-day training session to learn about "the nature of new teachers" and "developmental mentoring," says Carole Einhorn, the program coordinator. Developmental mentoring helps mentors learn when to be directive, something recent arrivals to teaching need more than their experienced colleagues. But mentors must balance this direction with listening and collaboration to help a new teacher arrive at her own solutions to problems.
In District 15, mentors and their partners meet weekly to plan lessons for the entire school year; in addition, they come together in grade-level meetings and informally. New teachers also take part in a five-day program focused on the district's data-driven culture, where they learn to use tools to rate themselves against the Illinois professional teaching standards. They also learn to help their students apply similar tools for data gathering and goal mapping.
Staying the Course
In general, a mentoring program should have both a well-thought-out structure and someone in charge to sustain it during the school year and beyond, says Judy Carr, a school reform consultant and an associate professor in the University of South Florida's Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies.
This sort of planning for the long term is particularly important to officials in Oswego City School District, because the New York district will lose about 60 percent of its staff within five years due to retirements. As those experienced teachers leave, district leaders want to avoid any related drop in student achievement. With this goal in mind, building mentors meet with new staff weekly, conduct classroom observations, and arrange for new teachers to sit in on classes taught by their more experienced colleagues.
Called Shoulder-to-Shoulder, Oswego's mentoring program is over-seen by five content-area teachers who have been relieved of their classroom duties so they can train mentors and model lessons for new teachers. Dianna Tice is one such "teacher on assignment." Tice encourages mentors and new teachers to use a month-by-month calendar of topics, designed by Carr, for guidance on important issues throughout the school year. In September, for example, mentors help the teachers with classroom management and goal setting. In November, they help the teachers prepare for parent conferences, and in December mentors and teachers explore ways to manage stress. From February through April, they strategize about the best ways to administer and use assessments at the classroom, local, and state levels. "We see the calendar as a place to begin the conversation" between mentors and new educators, says Tice.
Tice, who has taught in Oswego schools since 1972, says that formalizing support of the mentoring relationship is more essential now than in the past. One factor is the increased amount of curriculum content that students are expected to master. "There are huge pressures on these teachers because the learning is going to be assessed at local and state levels—and through standardized tests," she says.
Most of all, notes Carr, mentoring requires leadership at the school or district level. "Someone needs to take responsibility. The level of coordination [for mentoring programs] is very involved, whether it's scheduling meetings or checking out resources for training," she warns. "These are ongoing—and if no one is paying attention to that, then, although mentoring starts out strong at the beginning of the year, it will devolve into well-intentioned people just ‘helping out.’"
