Building School Capacity: Shared Leadership and Professional Learning Communities. A Research Proposal

If schools are to meet the needs of students and achieve educational success, to achieve both goals simultaneously, they should provide opportunities for teachers to innovate, share experiences and learn together. Schools should thus be configured as Professional Learning Communities (PLCs). This article links this term to building the collective capacity of the school through distributed leadership. It combines in a mixed design the description of the situation in Elementary and Secondary schools of Andalusia, with in-depth case studies, properly selected, that can show progress in their levels of educational success, according to the degree of distributed leadership development that promotes the development of the school as a PLC. We are more interested in practices that evidence success in education achievements rather than in good practices. One of the main aims of the research proposal is to identify and describe the conditions and processes in which direction's leadership enables the development of schools as PLCs.