Action Research Weekly Thoughts - Week 4

This week saw many changes to my action research topic. After visiting with the leaders of the new teacher mentor program here on campus, I decided it would be in my best interest to direct my focus on school leadership by focusing on how new teachers are led. So, I am currently reseraching the effectiveness of the new teacher mentor program.
A few years ago, my district cut funding for professional development. Currently, many programs that were awarded funding in the past (albiet minimal funding) now struggle to find ways to keep meaningful work going. The new teacher mentor program is one that now functions without any pay for its leaders. While there is still a group of teachers doing excellent work with new teachers, I feel the overall goals are not being met. There are many questions that have been circling in my mind regarding this program:
What consitutes a 'new' teacher; one new to the profession, one new to the district, to the school, to a certain content area? What incentives can we offer to raise the meetings' attendance? What can be done to make the meetings more meaningful? What can be done to make the professional development for new teachers more meaningful? How can we best pair teacher mentors with new teachers? How can we encourage new teachers to attend trainings, since they (ironically) do not need the hours (new teachers receive more PD hours than most teachers)? How can we direct our focus on the people, the leadership, rather than simply implementing a program to help new teachers?
This last question is important to me because I believe if we grow the new teachers, we will get much better results than if we simply assign Teacher A to Teacher B, put meetings on the calendar, have teachers sign in, sit and listen to how procedures will be implemented, ask for questions, then adjourn.