Educators face the daunting task of ensuring that every student makes academic progress.  New teachers and administrators find this task overwhelming when combined with the pressures of being new to a job. Over the past three years, the instructional leadership faculty at Jacksonville State University has developed an induction program for new teachers in its service area and a successful mentoring program for educational leadership students that includes on-line and job-embedded professional development activities for both mentors and mentees.  The faculty members believe that by providing effective, instructionally-focused mentoring for new employees, schools develop leadership capacity, the center piece of school improvement and higher achievement for all students.  This proposed paper/presentation will trace the development of the multi-level mentoring components of the instructional leadership program(s), the mechanisms describing how the mentoring is carried out, including training programs for mentors and mentees, the relationships between university faculty, LEA (Local Education Agency) partners, administrators, and the students. Specifically, the program of study is designed from beginning to end with mentorship being the primary component: university faculty train principals and other local school administrators to mentor teachers and other prospective administrators as instructional leaders. In essence, internship-type requirements run the entire length of the program(s). The effectiveness of mentoring in these re-designed instructional leadership programs will be demonstrated. The 60-page mentor’s guide will be made available to participants.

The purpose of this study was to determine the most valuable and most challenging aspects of an induction and mentoring program in four West Tennessee rural counties. A total of 165 teachers, mentors and principals responded to an online induction survey conducted by the New Teacher Center, Santa Cruz, that was designed to capture the extent to which respondents agreed with statements about their experiences and the degree to which the New Teacher Center program contributed to various aspects of their teacher growth and development. Across the four districts, in terms of demographics, teachers, mentors, and site administrators who responded to the surveys were mostly female and Caucasian. The analyses included a summary of respondent demographics, and an evaluation of responses to the open-ended survey questions for each available respondent group. All three respondent groups agreed that collaboration, communication, and support were the most valuable or effective aspects of the program. Teachers also noted the challenging teaching and learning conditions present in their school buildings that made it difficult to meet the achievement needs of their students.

Key words: Induction, collaboration, mentoring, support, mentors, teachers