Collaboration and leadership in a disciplinary group of coordinators and teachers: opportunities and obstacles

This study aimed to identify how leadership and collaboration of a group of teachers and coordinators take place, as well as describe the obstacles and opportunities the face. The study is based theoretically on the discourses of cultures of collaboration and restructuring, conceptions of teaching leadership and empirical studies. The participants were interviewed through a qualitative approach. The data resulted in six categories to analyze. The results show that participants distinguished between teamwork and collaboration. It is identified that collaboration and leadership not only depend on the leadership assigned to coordinators, so that teachers are also actors in a distributed leadership. Teachers distinguished practices that stimulate and hinder collaboration, such as those generated by working conditions and the balkanization of groups, finally we suggest proposals for improving leadership and collaboration in their institution.