3.6 A mentoring mindset: preparing future principals to be effective  (Page 3/10)

The Assignment: Seek A Mentor

Students in the Mentoring for Educational Leadership course, offered during the 2007 summer term were informed that their major assignment was to (a) choose someone they would like to have as a mentor, (b) approach that individual with the request for mentoring, and (c) conduct an initial mentoring session. When this assignment was announced on the first evening of class, the looks on the faces of the students, and their flood of questions, told me that they never predicted such a requirement in the course.

The syllabus description emphasized that they would be learning about mentoring new teachers. However, I chose to teach this course around the concept of the mentoring constellation (Stanley&Clinton, 1992). Stanley and Clinton propose that every individual should have a mentoring constellation, which includes an upward mentor, peer mentors and a downward mentoring relationship with a protégé. Thus they believe that we all need a mentor and we all need to be mentoring someone. When it comes to peer mentors, we need two types: an ally within our organization, and a confidant who is outside our organization (Searby, 2007). Based on this model, I organized each class session to address the various levels of the mentoring constellation. One third of the class time was devoted to preparing the students to approach their upward mentor. One third of the time was spent in peer mentoring sessions with pairs of students in the class using prompts designed to help them gain self-knowledge and to be reflective. The remaining time was spent on material pertaining to downward mentoring, specifically, mentoring new teachers. This article, however, will focus only on the portion of class that prepared students to ask for a mentor and become effective protégés.

The ProtégéPreparation Process

Students were made aware that there are preparations they should make before entering into a mentoring relationship. In order to take the initiative in forming a learning partnership, students needed to be armed with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that would enable them to be effective protégés (Searby&Tripses, 2007). Daresh and Playko (1995) suggest that the skills of“protégéship”can be acquired. In the Mentoring for Educational Leadership course, I addressed the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that students should develop in order to be effective protégés through a variety of learning activities. The framework for protegeship developed by Searby and Tripses (2007) and illustrated here, gave guidance to the process.