Professional Learning Communities. A challenge for leadership in Chilean schools

Professional Learning Communities (PLA) as a strategy for educational innovation has been researched in different school systems in North America and Europe and has reported significant contributions to strengthening student learning and teacher development, all under an understanding of informal, collaborative learning that is tailored to the needs of each school. In this way, both teachers and students learn at school, transforming classroom practice into a space for ongoing research. In Chile, this understanding of teacher learning has been established by various guiding instruments of the school system, in addition to the current regulations that emphasise the training of CPAs as a priority task for principals and managers, thus projecting situated teacher professional development, with a focus on reflection and collaboration as the pillars of this process. In this context, the doctoral research Professional Learning Communities. A challenge for leadership in Chilean schools, the general objective is to analyse the relationship between the principal’s leadership practices and the formation of Professional Learning Communities in Chilean schools, identifying the actions that principals develop in educational contexts in order to enhance collaboration among teachers. The methodology developed corresponds to a collective case study, of an instrumental nature, using mixed methods. Five cases corresponding to educational centres in Chile, both in the Metropolitan Region and in Valparaíso, participated in the study. The inclusion criteria considered convenience and access to the field of study; principals who have been working for more than one year in the establishment, and who implement spaces for teacher collaboration. The instrument used for the quantitative component comprised the PLCA-R questionnaire (Olivier et al., 2010) applied to the teaching and management team of each school (one hundred and sixty-one informants). On the other hand, from a qualitative approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the principals of each school (five in total), together with focus groups with teachers and principals (two for each school, for a total of ten). The results indicate that the challenges that school leaders face in strengthening collaboration under the CPA model are varied. In the first instance, the development of a distributed approach to leadership is visualised, in the logic of changing the vertical power structure towards more participatory and democratic practices. On the other hand, the creation of conditions such as material resources and specialised spaces is an important task. Finally, the development of systematic and profound instances for teacher learning is presented as a practice that needs to be strengthened in the cases studied. By way of conclusion, it is established that the impact of principals is important in the development of Professional Learning Communities, in relation to four dimensions: a) organisational conditions; b) learning climates in the school; c) capacity building; and finally; d) management with stakeholders. Finally, a last contribution based on the knowledge generated in the research is the design of a proposal for management learning that allows for the development of fundamental practices for the management of PLCs, identifying four axes and thirty-eight management practices.