Academic Mentoring in Education

The study conceptualizes academic mentoring as a comprehensive model for the professional and scholarly development of educational professionals, grounded in a sustainable university–school partnership. Academic mentoring is understood as an ongoing and reciprocal process of collaborative learning, reflection, and inquiry that integrates the academic and methodological expertise of the university educator with the teacher’s contextual knowledge and practical experience. The theoretical framework brings together the concepts of university–school partnership, the Third Space, professional boundary crossing, action research, and the teacher as researcher. Through a review and conceptual comparison of scholarly sources, the study analyses participants’ roles, the development of research competence, the power-related and ethical dimensions of mentoring relationships, the conditions for institutional sustainability, and the possibilities for mobilizing the knowledge generated. An original cyclical model is proposed, encompassing the identification and formulation of a pedagogical problem, collaborative planning, pedagogical intervention, data collection and analysis, reflection, public dissemination, and the subsequent use of the findings. A multilevel framework has also been developed for evaluating the input conditions, process quality, immediate outputs, professional outcomes, and longer-term institutional impact. The study presents the first stage of the model’s practical implementation within the National Research Programme “Development of Research and Innovation in the Bulgarian Preschool and School Education System.” The findings provide evidence of the model’s feasibility and initial applicability across different educational contexts, without claiming its conclusive empirical validation. The conclusions identify academic mentoring as a promising mechanism for developing the teacher as researcher, strengthening university–school partnerships, and transforming pedagogical experience into substantiated, verifiable, and shareable professional knowledge.