The paper will expose the findings from the program ‘Self-training Groups for School Leadership’ carried out in Andalusia, Spain, by a team from the University of Seville in collaboration with the regional educational authorities at the Junta de Andalusia and funding from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. The program aimed to train experienced school principals using feedback and group coaching. Participants worked in small groups of six plus a coach, analysing their practice and role as educational leaders by means of a highly structured sequence designed to facilitate school leadership knowledge building and sharing.

This program is based on a former one developed by a consortium of research teams from Australia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland (coordinators), United Kingdom and USA, funded by the European Community as a Lifelong Learning Programme, Comenius Multilateral, called “Professional Learning through Reflection promoted by Feedback and Coaching” (PROFLEC). PROFLEC training program and its associated diagnosis tool Competence Profile School Management (CPSM) was designed and piloted during the two-year period 2013-14. A preview of the current program and its differences with PROFLEC program was presented at ECER-Dublin 2016.

OECD countries have paid increasing attention to the preparation of school leaders in the last years (Pont, Nusche and Moorman, 2008). The proliferation of training programs has put into evidence the necessity of a profound methodological renovation. Most of the studies show that traditional methodologies like the combination of conferences and personal study, where experts recommends the competences leaders should master and the strategies they should carry out, without taking the context into account, rarely produce lasting effects (Cohen, 1990; Coburn and Woulfin, 2012).

On the contrary, the most effective programs have proved to be those that combine theory and practice, involving the trainees in the analysis of both their roles and significant problems they had to cope with (Hallinger and Snidvongs, 2005). Interesting enough are the cooperative strategies, with a focus on knowledge sharing and teamwork. Also relevant are the strategies that promote the analysis of participants’ practice, by means of methodologies such as providing feedback, self-assessment, clinical supervision, mentoring, and coaching (Antal, 1997; Bean, 2004; Coburn and Woulfin, 2012; Huber, 2013). These strategies do not aim to a supposedly right way to be a leader but to broaden the leaders toolkit in order to facilitate them contextually-adjusted responses as possible.

The program adopts a group-coaching model (Flückiger, Aas, Nicolaidou, Johnson and Lovett, 2016) where the group is the main agent for building knowledge. The coach does not act in this model as an expert, giving advice or providing codified knowledge, but as a facilitator who promotes and control communication, helping the group to progress throughout a successful learning sequence (Hargrove, 2008; O’Mahony and Barnett, 2008; Wise and Jacobo, 2010; Aas and Flückiger, 2016).

Practice based reflection needs to be underpinned by diagnostic tools that provide reliable information. Diagnosis can refers to implicit or previous theories-in-use, attitudes, expectations, goals, training needs or competencies from the participants, allowing a more personalised focus of the training program (Stroud, 2005; Huber, 2010; Mavrogordato and Cannon, 2009). But also relevant characteristics of the trainees’ organizational context should be identified. As leaders’ success is linked to the capability to adapt or modify the leadership style according to the group characterictics and situation, it is fundamental to provide participants effective tools to diagnose not only their characteristics as leaders but school relevant characteristics as well.For this reason our program counts on two diagnostic tools of school leadership, based on both the leaders’ competencies profile and the school context. 

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