SCHOOL LEADERSHIP. A REVIEW OF CURRENT RESEARCH PERSPECTIVES

As most of top-bottom educational reforms have proved very limited impact on school improvement, educational leadership is increasingly perceived as the key factor to promote such improvement, facilitating the conditions that can lead us towards more successful schools. Departing from a review of the current international literature, this paper suggests and discusses three of the relevant focus of the research about educational leadership, including: leadership for learning, distributed leadership, and leadership for social justice. Such dimensions are respectively the core interest of each of the three current research projects (funded by the National R&D&I Plan) led by the authors of the paper. On the one hand, the current understanding of leadership is far from the vision of the principal as the only agent that exerts power and influence in the school and close to a shared o distributed perspective. On the other hand, only instructional leadership will be capable to improve learning, building conditions for teachers to improve their teaching. Finally, schools need a leadership for social justice in order to ensure a good education to all students, from an inclusive and equitable perspective. Bearing in mind the purpose of getting connected such perspectives, the authors of the article have recently launched the "Network of Research on Leadership and School Improvement".