The Spanish Model of Teachers as School Leaders: Social Justice for Inclusion and Sustainability

Abstract

In Spain teachers can take on variety of leadership roles. One of the most important is the tradition of selecting the principal from among the school’s teaching staff. The teacher candidate proposes a program for school improvement and serves for one or two periods as principal before returning to the teaching role. This system ensures teacher leadership by requiring that the principal have classroom experience and a teacher’s perspective. Teachers exercise leadership by taking a turn at administration. In this article, we present the findings of research on aspects of teacher leadership using the framework of social justice. We conducted a basic qualitative analysis of interviews with teachers who became principals in five primary and secondary educational institutions in Catalonia, Spain. We examined how these principals viewed issues of social justice and what support strategies enabled them to confront the challenges posed by increasingly diverse educational environments. We identified a gap in the training programs for teachers who become school leaders, as they do not encompass aspects related to transition and leadership handover or inclusion processes, which may impact the sustainability of educational initiatives.