Page 12 - Sponsor Booklet

Sponsor as Peer Mentor
What is a Peer Mentor and
why are they important?

BPs are swamped with the day-to-day issues of
running a school. Even though they recognize that professional
development will have a beneficial impact on their own and the
school’s future performance, they often lack the time to address
abstract, long-term professional learning needs. A peer mentoring
process has the potential to address issues related to professional
isolation, job overload, management and leadership of change,
access to broader information and support networks and the need
to bridge the perceived gap between the rhetoric and the reality of
running a school.

The mentoring relationship within the Learning Squares fosters a
culture where principals no longer work alone. They collaborate
with peers to reflect on practice and pose solutions to problems.
They share and seek better solutions, new findings, and innovative
and effective strategies and methods; and support each other in
questioning these. Together they focus on school improvement
and discard practices that do not produce the desired improvement
results. Their questioning becomes cyclical in nature - one question
leads to another to another etc. They are excited about new
questions that stimulate answers.

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