Chapter 13: A Conceptual Model of School Principal Mentoring: Nurturing Wellness (and Wellbeing) Within a Continuum of School Leadership Preparation

Scholarly literature documents the pressures and rich skill set that new school administrators encounter and need respectively when they assume building level and district level supervisory positions (i.e., school principal, assistant principal, and school superintendent (DeMatthews et al., 2021; Reames et al., 2014; Spillane et al., 2019). New school leaders experience routine isolation, loneliness, fear, and disillusionment when realizing the complexities of school organizations for which they are entrusted to supervise. They also must cope with how to neutralize the trauma that students and families exhibit daily in high-need school communities. Furthermore, these leaders are mandated to improve low performing schools or to accelerate high performing schools, while at the same time often encountering intractable institutional challenges, such as low teacher quality, insolvent school budgets, receding parental participation, defiant student behavior, and conflicting environmental pressures. While attractive in the short-run, the financial incentives of assuming school leader positions are eventually overtaken by socio-emotional imbalances that school leaders develop overtime, forming the acute need for rehabilitation to regain wellbeing and a sound mind.