Thesis advisor: Elizabeth Twomey / New teachers arrive to our nation's schools with a range of educational preparation and professional experience. Schools endeavor to alleviate these differences, build professional capacity, and guarantee the efficacy of new teachers (thus more quickly improving educational quality for children) most frequently through induction programs. Researchers identify mentoring as the most common means of inducting new teachers. The school reform movement and related law have influenced mentoring frequency, goals, and practices, as have recent advances in understanding how adults learn. With the number of new teachers expected in both public and independent schools within the current decade, the intense pressure of reform mandates, and public expectations on teacher quality, the effectiveness of new teacher induction and mentoring programs is paramount. Likewise, as the nation increases in its overall diversity, how mentoring programs address the race and ethnicity of new teachers and mentors, particularly when the vast majority of veteran mentor teachers for the near future will be White, is also critical to program success. This study examined the effect of a newly implemented induction and mentoring program on a cohort of new teachers during their first year of service in an independent school. The school had a strategic initiative to diversify its faculty. Consequently, an essential element of the study was to investigate the experience of new teachers of color who were involved in cross-race mentor-new teacher relationships in contrast to the experience of their White counterparts involved in the same program for the same academic year. An overview of the study, a review of relevant literature, the study's design, results, and discussion of findings and their implications are presented. / Thesis (EdD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Administration and Higher Education.

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Professional development of beginning teachers through induction and mentoring has been commonly viewed as important for teachers' success and continuation in the teaching profession. Induction and specifically mentoring programs focus attention on transitions from one stage of teacher development to another. The three phases of teacher development are initial teacher education, known as pre-service, the induction phase and the ongoing teacher in-service education. The move from student to teacher is the most demanding change in learning to teach. The beginning teacher in this change must adjust from thinking and acting as a student, absorbed with his or her own learning and performance, to thinking and acting as a teacher, accepting responsibility for the learning and performance of others. Beginning teachers are fully engaged in this essential development, and mentoring programs are purposely intended to support them through this period of change. This study has established that beginning teachers in Papua New Guinea (PNG) do experience challenges in the first few months of teaching but these issues lapse over time with the support and assistance of mentors/supervisors. Mentoring has great potential for group effort and transformational teacher learning within schools as professional learning communities. In order for mentors to perform their tasks well and draw benefits from mentoring, appropriate support and training for mentors is recommended. As well as support and training, other incentives for mentors such as salary increments and reduced teaching loads would be a welcome step to enhancing induction and mentoring programs in PNG primary schools.