MENTORING AND COACHING IN EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP: FOSTERING REFLECTIVE AND STRATEGIC SCHOOL LEADERS

<p>In the context of increasingly complex and demanding educational environments, school leadership must evolve through sustained, reflective, and context-responsive professional development. This paper examines the integral role of mentoring and coaching as dual modalities for cultivating adaptive, inclusive, and strategic educational leaders. Drawing on recent literature in leadership development, organizational learning, and adult education, we delineate the conceptual boundaries and synergies between mentoring—grounded in relational trust, identity formation, and professional socialization—and coaching, which emphasizes structured reflection, feedback, and performance-oriented goal setting. We explore theoretical models such as the GROW framework, reflective practice theory, and identity-centered leadership to frame how these practices operate within formal and informal developmental structures. Emphasis <br />is placed on the necessity of embedding these approaches into leadership pipelines, school improvement plans, and peer collaboration systems. Through an integrative review of contemporary empirical findings, we argue that mentoring and coaching are not peripheral but foundational to leadership capacity building in Gymnasia (lower secondary schools), General Lyceums (upper secondary general schools), and EPAL (vocational upper secondary schools) institutions. The paper further advocates for equity-responsive, context-specific, and longitudinally evaluated mentoring and coaching systems as a means to foster resilient, emotionally intelligent, and socially responsive school leaders.</p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0900/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>