SPECIAL SECTION PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT I: PRINCIPALS Colleagues Helping Colleagues:

Expectations from the standards movement, reform, and advances in tech-nology pose challenges that school leaders must be prepared to face. This arti-cle advocates principal preparation and cultivation through mentoring and coaching. It clarifies the differences, uses in succession planning, new prin-cipalships and job changers, and benefits to both the mentor and protégé. The business of schooling has become increasingly more complex over the last decade and will certainly continue as the millennium progresses. These higher expectations come in the midst of teacher and administrator shortages; unprecedented competition in the workplace for future profession-als; and the diverse learning, social, and emotional needs of today’s children. This focus has applied unrealistic pressure on those who choose to lead. How can school leaders be cultivated and readied for the challenges they will face? How can learning be accelerated and made more meaningful? How can prospective principals and others learn from their experiences and tap collegial frameworks? Mentoring and coaching processes can serve to augment the succession planning and professional development of districts. They can model a culture of collaboration and collegiality in which best thinking occurs through collective judgment. In short, they are the low-cost answer to the best way adults learn. This article seeks to clarify what mentoring and coaching are; their uses in succession planning, new principalships, and job changers; and the benefits to principals. Survey responses from principals representing urban and rural districts in North Carolina and Mississippi are used to provide commentary on the practice of mentoring and coaching administrators. NASSP Bulletin n Vol. 84 No. 617 September 2000 29 Note: The author thanks the principals in the Wake County (Miss.) and the Nash-Rocky Mount (N.C.) Public School Systems for providing their perspectives in response to a survey and for providing writ-ten feedback regarding mentoring and coaching. Peggy A. Hopkins-Thompson is the former director of the Wake Leadership Academy in Raleigh, N.C., and has served as the director of human resources and director of the North Carolina Assessmen