Term of Award

Fall 2015

Degree Name

Doctor of Education in Education Administration (Ed.D.)

Document Type and Release Option

Dissertation (restricted to Georgia Southern)

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Department

Department of Leadership, Technology, and Human Development

Committee Chair

Devon Jensen

Committee Member 1

Jason LaFrance

Committee Member 2

Teri Melton

Abstract

With the high rates of attrition for beginning teachers, school district personnel encounter a continuous rotation of recruiting, hiring, and inducting teachers. Mentoring is a popular means to help beginning teacher’s transition into their first years of teaching. Mentoring programs have become essential sources of support for beginning teachers who are expected to implement the same duties as veteran teachers even though they lack the same length of experience.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to evaluate the current mentoring model of an urban school district and compare the mentoring program’s components to those of the Wood and Stanulis mentoring framework. The study examined if there were missing components to the mentoring framework that could be added to improve the effectiveness of the mentoring program.

The methodology used to collect data for this study was surveys, interviews, and observations. Purposeful sampling was used to assist the researcher to obtain rich information from participants about their experiences to determine the design of the program and to compare the components of the current mentoring model to the components of the mentoring framework. The following conclusions were drawn from this study: a positive relationship between the educated mentor and the teacher mentoring program, support for the mentoring framework organized by Wood and Stanulis, and teacher support provision through observation and feedback. The findings from this study enabled the researcher to make several recommendations to further refine the ongoing effort to improve teacher mentoring programs for beginning teachers.

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