This paper analyses the Spanish experience about the piloting of a training device for school principals carried out by an international consortium of ten research groups, mostly European, in the framework of a funded Lifelong Learning Program, Comenius Multilateral Project entitled “Professional Learning through Reflection promoted by Feedback and Coaching” (PROFLEC)”. This project presumed that effective training programs for leaders’ professional development need to promote the fitting of the leadership practice and the characteristics of the school for each participant. For this reason a focus on the analysis of their own practice and group coaching was adopted.

Continuous professional development programs for school leaders at different stages -aspiring, newly appointed and experienced- have undergone a great progress in the last years (Lankau y Feldman, 2005; Huff et al., 2013). However, different studies show that the traditional methodologies they have chiefly adopted, such as workshops or lectures provided by experts, rarely achieve long-lasting effects (Cohen, 1990; Coburn y Woulfin, 2012).

It is well known that most of the professional knowledge that principals claim themselves is said to have been obtained from their own practice and experience (Zhang y Brundrett, 2010). It probably explains principals’ preference for strategies that allow contextualised learning (Neufeld y Roper, 2003; Bean, 2004) while they are involved in the analysis of the kind of problems they usually tackle in their work (Hallinguer y Snidvongs, 2005; Bean, 2004; Coburn y Woulfin, 2012).

As a consequence, a great variety of non-traditional strategies have been proposed, especially those with an emphasis on horizontal communication, reflection, teamwork and analysis of the practice, by means of methodologies such as self-evaluation, feedback, clinic supervision, mentoring or coaching (Huber, 2004, 2010a, 2010b). However, if this sort of training strategies wants to succeed, the concurrence of effective tools to diagnose the participants’ leadership practices and provide them focused and structured feedback is needed. Such tools play an important role in the personalization of the training devices as they make use of the trainees’ previous knowledge, theories in use, attitudes, expectations, goals, problems and training needs (Stroud, 2005; Mavrogordato y Cannon, 2009).

For this reason, a core part of the PROFLEC training program consisted on the inventory “Competency Profile of School Managers” (CPSM) which has been experimentally piloted as well. The whole PROFLEC Project has been developed in Spain by the members of an established research group that belongs to the University of Seville, Department of Teaching and School Organization at the Faculty of Education. The Project also counted on the collaboration of the educational authorities and the teachers’ centers of Seville and Huelva (two of the western provinces of the autonomous community of Andalusia). The CPD program designed by PROFLEC was offered as a specific training course for school principals that were interested in improving their leadership capacities.

The paper will analyse the degree in which both devices –the inventory and the training program- achieved the proposed aims in terms of participants’ learning and the improvement of the principalship practice. Such analysis is based on the information collected through questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and systematic observation of the program activities. According to the results and conclusions of the inquiry about the impact of the training program, the paper will also propose an improved version that can be transferred to the educational system.

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