Towards the Establishment of Professional Learning Communities Through Distributed Leadership. A Systematic Review

This article corresponds to a systematic review that analyzes the relationship of leadership, in its distributed variant with professional learning communities, both concepts highly demanded by international research. The process has followed patterns carried out in other systematic reviews indexed in high impact journals, to predict its systematic. During the same, a thorough search was made of articles located in the Scopus database, during the period 2008 to 2017. After the application of the inclusion criteria, 18 articles constituted the sample of the present article. The selected articles highlight the strong influence of leadership in the transformation of educational centers into professional learning communities. At the same time, a trend toward distributed leadership modalities has been corroborated as a guarantor mechanism for instructional improvements in the schools. So is a certain coincidence in highlighting the importance of certain factors such as teacher collaboration, greater flexibility of organizational structures or the empowerment of teachers as a way to enhance the professional capital of staff, while generating internal changes in the organization leading to a school improvement.