School Improvement: Current Lines of Research

Abstract

This paper makes a current review of school improvement policies from the school perspective as a key unit of change and organizational learning. Instead of vertical or prescriptive strategies, this implies horizontal ways of working with schools, so that they can build their improvement capacities. A growing corpus of research suggests that the school needs to be articulated through the development of pedagogical leadership and a professional community. A distributive understanding of leadership can promote a professional learning community. The sustainability of change is supported by school-wide building school capacity to promote professional learning.