Mentoring across multiple generations of school leaders

Higher expectations for student achievement, administrative shortages, and more diverse emotional, social and learning needs of students, make the job of the educational leader a challenging one for today's school principals and district administrators. Superintendents and educators across the nation report a shortage of qualified candidates to fill principal vacancies. Mentoring was studied as a strategy to support the retention and development of school leaders. This phenomenological study focused on mentoring practices across multiple generations of educational leaders that had been successfully mentored. Selected mentors identified proteges whom they had mentored. The identification of mentors and proteges continued through five school leader mentoring generations. Each family consisted of five participants who had served as both mentor and protege. Each participant was asked open-ended interview questions about their roles as a mentor and as a protege. A total of 10 school leaders participated in this study. There were two interrelated research purposes of this study: (a) To understand the different meanings/practices of mentoring and being mentored, and further; (b) to explore whether there may be intergenerational patterns of mentoring that have been "inherited" by members of mentoring "families." In studying the relationship between mentoring and leadership development, the research design identified two distinct "families" of mentors and proteges. The significance of this design allowed the researcher to focus on "inherited" patterns of mentoring in order to better understand how mentoring might simultaneously promote cultural transmission and reproduction as well as the need for mutual and continuous learning. This study found that the cultural norms and values of Mentoring Family 1 and of Mentoring Family 2 were passed on from the first generation to the next through traditional mentoring and/or co-mentoring strategies. Mentoring strategies passed on from one generation to the next in both Family 1 and in Family 2 through mentors providing opportunities that opened doors that lead to advancement, socialization of proteges into new professional roles, and the development of trust and friendship. Role modeling and informal communication were the key learning strategies identified. These mentoring traits passed on relatively unchanged from one dyad to the next in both families.