Mentoring programs depend on a complex personal and professional relationship between a novice teacher and a veteran teacher. The study described here was designed to add to the knowledge of mentor roles, benefits of mentoring, and obstacles to mentoring. This report is based on the first of two meetings with a diverse group of mentor teachers…

For mentoring to remain as one viable component of quality teacher induction, the roles of mentors, the benefits of mentoring and the obstacles to effective mentoring must be scrutinized and questions about the overall value of mentoring must be addressed. In the study discussed in this paper, 24 teachers who served as mentors for beginning…