Educational Leadership Training, the Construction of Learning Communities. A Systematic Review

Abstract

Instructional leadership notions and practices allow educators to engage in relevant roles within schools. Instead of implementing these concepts in professional programs, Mexican and Spanish education systems still preserve a “technically oriented” training model that separates educational and professional aims. Diverse studies have identified the benefits of implementing instructional leadership orientations within “Educational cooperation”, “Cooperative education”, “Team teaching” and “Teacher leadership” at schools. This systematic review conducted using Web of Science—contributes by organizing the produced knowledge and identifies the main findings reported by the academic literature on this topic. It seeks to answer the following questions: (1) What are the contributions of this research to the education systems examined? (2) What kind of knowledge about educational leadership and professional learning communities can be inferred from them? Results from the majority of studies found that instructional leadership offers a useful tool to promote shared responsibility between teachers and head teachers and supports professional learning communities. A main conclusions of the present study is that it highlights the importance of bypassing existing bureaucratic practices within schools in order to replace the traditional “technical orientation” of training programs. Instructional leadership may facilitate some of the required transformations in the context of global educational reform.

Leadership as Learning: a studentfocused training approach

“…On the other hand, García, Díaz, and Ubago (2018) reflect on the objectives of continuous education, which are openly tailored distinctly for teachers and school principals, a practice that may not be consistent with the learning dynamics of the school community. Consequently, the authors argue that programs centered on pedagogical leadership, bringing together teachers and principals, can provide guidance for developing collaboration-based leadership practices and, in turn, foster systemic and sustainable improvement over time.…”

Sustainability service learning in economics

“…Service learning (Lavery et al , 2018) and cooperative teaching (García-Martínez et al , 2018) emphasize possible links between science and practice as well as interdisciplinarity. Cooperative teaching or team teaching is a linking of multiple teachers in a teaching arrangement whose outcomes and skill acquisition go beyond the delivery of a course alone (García-Martínez et al , 2018). Cooperative learning is a particular form of collaborative learning for reciprocal skill acquisition (Newell and Bain, 2018).…”

“…In service-learning and team-teaching, various organizational and cooperation aspects are relevant, such as content-related, organizational, material, pedagogical, etc. as well as different levels of cooperation (Newell and Bain, 2018; García-Martínez et al , 2018). Characteristics of successful cooperative teaching and successful participation in service learning include components of both teachers, such as personality, relationship design and organizational-structural factors, and student groups, such as their composition in terms of prior education, heterogeneity and consistency and group structure (Kummer Wyss, 2017).…”

Enhancing Creative Problem Solving in Postgraduate Courses of Education Management Using Project-Based Learning

“…It is essential for graduates to possess problem-solving skills to confront a world with a fast-shifting workforce based on global partnerships and digital transformation (Klegeris et al, 2016;Meo, 2014;Bonikowska et al, 2008). The contribution of the field of educational administration and educational management is particularly significant in developing students" knowledge and skills of educational leadership (Chen et al, 2020;Garcí a-Martí nez et al, 2018). Since a creative problem-solving ability is a crucial characteristic of educational leaders, who are invariably faced with complex, unique and open-ended situations, they are deliberately trained to develop these problem-solving skills (Visone, 2018).…”