Mentoring as a Professional DeveloPMent strategy for instructional coaches: Who Mentors the Mentors?

School districts across America have responded to the accountability movement by increasing professional development activities, including the utilization of onsite coaching strategies for educators. But who is mentoring the mentors? This descriptive study in one Western state found that 56% of instructional coaches reported they did not have a mentor, yet 90% of respondents thought mentoring was important for beginning instructional coaches, and 58% thought mentoring was important even for experienced instructional coaches. This study also reported on the areas that instructional coaches thought were important to be mentored in and the barriers that hindered their district in providing a mentoring program. As the accountability movement sweeps across the educational landscape of the United States, the pressure on educators has been mounting. As schools search for more effective methods of influencing student achievement we can observe increased spending on alternative ways to address professional development; among these are instructional coaching and peer coaching programs (Stichter, Lewis, Richter, Johnson, & Bradley, 2006). This approach provides training that is sustained over time as teachers work one-on-one with an equally or more experienced teacher (Boyle, Lamprianou, & Boyle, 2005). Such an approach requires an onsite coach who provides not only training, but also modeling and feedback on the instructional strategies being implemented (Knight, 2007). As schools invest more heavily in training their educators in new instructional strategies, it becomes important to ensure that the instructional coaches themselves are provided the support and training they need to become successful. Principals and instructional facilitators alike recognize the need for mentoring, even for those individuals with experience (Duncan & Stock, 2009; Stock & Duncan, 2009). Since 2006, school districts in the state of Wyoming have been provided additional funding outside the normal school funding formula for the purpose of hiring instructional facilitators. As of 2009, 398 facilitators were working with K–12 teachers in Wyoming schools. This study examines how these instructional facilitators were mentored and what instructional facilitators saw as their mentoring needs. Who is mentoring the mentors? Mark J. Stock Heather E. Duncan Planning and Changing Vol. 41, No. 1/2, 2010, pp. 57–69