3.6 A mentoring mindset: preparing future principals to be effective  (Page 2/10)

Rationale for Mentoring Aspiring Principals

Highly skilled school leaders are not born, nor do they emerge from traditional graduate programs in school administration fully prepared to lead (Southern Regional Education Board, 2007). It is generally recognized that they will need guidance from a more experienced school leader in their early years of administration. The National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP, 2003) in Making the Case for Principal Mentoring, reported that principals are traditionally“thrown into their jobs without a lifejacket”(p. 8), unprepared for the demands of the position, feeling isolated and without guidance. Workplace mentoring is critical for inexperienced school leaders so as to provide a bridge between theory learned in graduate school and the complex realities of contemporary school leadership. Although formal mentoring processes are often designed primarily to fulfill organizational needs, mentoring is essentially about learning. Zachary (2000) states“one of the principal reasons that mentoring relationships fail is that the learning process is not tended to and the focus of learning goals is not maintained”(p. 1). There is a need to help aspiring principals cultivate the disposition of embracing mentoring as an opportunity to further their professional learning goals. Furthermore, it is imperative that educational administration students understand that they play a critical role in preparing themselves for this future adult learning partnership called mentoring (Zachary, 2000).

From a learning perspective, future principals need to have the ability to assess both the strengths and weaknesses of their leadership skills, reflect on these, and then make adjustments as needed. As they enter into the mentoring relationships that will assist them in this process, they should demonstrate the self-direction that is characteristic of adult learners (Knowles, 1980). A healthy mentoring relationship is a prime example of adults engaging in a learning endeavor together. As Zachary (2005) points out:

Mentoring is the quintessential expression of self-directed learning. At the heart of self-directed learning (and mentoring) is individual responsibility for learning. Self-responsibility means the learner accepts ownership and accountability (individually and with others) for setting personal learning objectives, developing strategies, finding resources, and evaluating learning. In a mentoring relationship, the responsibility is mutually defined and shared (p. 225).

I believe that future school leaders, as adult learners who know their own learning needs best, should take the initiative to engage in mentoring relationships and I emphasize this to graduate students preparing to be school principals. In the course titled Mentoring for Educational Leadership, one of my goals was to focus on the importance of mentoring relationships in the life of a leader. I discovered through class discussion that students held two common opinions of how to find a mentor: (a) one should wait to be assigned a mentor in a new job, or (b) there would be someone who would seek them out and volunteer to mentor them. My own knowledge of adult learning, combined with this eye-opening feedback from the students, strengthened my rationale for creating an assignment in this course that would prepare the students to be proactive protégés, taking the initiative to seek their own mentors. I reorganized the curriculum in a Mentoring for Educational Leadership course in the educational leadership preparation program at the University of XXXXXX in an effort to assist future school principals in developing the knowledge, skills, and dispositions of effective protégéship.