Mentoring within Internships: Socializing New School Leaders

Abstract

Framed by organizational socialization, this qualitative study examines the use of a formal arrangement of mentoring to socialize prospective school administrators. Participants were eight interns paired with eight principals from three school districts. Our ethnographic approach solicited an insider's view of mentoring based upon participants’ own narratives. Four types of relationships emerged from the data: (1) mentor-protégé dyad, (2) administrator-intern dyad (3) peer dyad, and (4) mentoring team. Distinguishing organizational socialization from quality mentoring, we describe how some interns received mentoring how other interns enabled their successful completion of internships even without mentoring, and how one intern failed. We offer four recommendations for the school organization to improve mentoring within internships and suggest avenues for further research.