Chapter 5: Evaluating the UA Pact Mentoring Program

Mentoring has become increasingly popular and more often included in leadership preparation programs and in district-provided professional development for new school leaders in the last two decades (e.g., Manna, 2015). Darling-Hammond, LaPointe, Meyerson, Orr, and Cohen (2007) identified six features of exemplary leadership development programs; one of them is mentoring and coaching. Mentoring can provide guidance and support to mentees, increase their self-confidence, promote networking, and help them achieve the professional goals within real working contexts (DeVita, Richard, Colvin, Darling-Hammond, & Haycock, 2007).

Realizing the critical role mentors play in leadership development led to the careful and deliberate selection of mentors for the Project Alabama Consortium for Turnaround (PACT) program participants. A review of the existing mentoring component in the leadership program prior to the PACT grant along with the current literature on mentoring informed the design of the PACT mentoring program. In the following sections, we summarize what research says about mentoring, the key aspects of mentoring and its impacts, followed by the description of our PACT mentoring program, whose development was guided by the research. Then we report the main results of our evaluation of the mentoring program.