The Influence of Training and Gender in Mentoring on Novice School Administrators

The role of the principal, as an instructional leader is one of the most important roles in education today. The demands of high accountability that are placed on school principals have caused legislators and educational reformers to require more rigorous training for school leaders. Many states now have mandated state mentoring programs for entry year principals. The purpose of this study was to examine and describe the roles and relationships between mentors and their mentees in the training and professional development of school administrators. This research was important because mentoring programs are not standardized and until recently, the majority of principals in the United States have been while males. This research contains the perspectives of 4 novice administrators who all had a mentor in the development of their becoming a school administrator and 4 mentors who played the role of helping to develop the mentees. The methodology was based on the descriptive, lived experience of qualitative research, using the phenomenological model (Creswell, 1998). The results of this study contribute to the research that has been conducted on novice administrators, their training and gender significance of their mentor