There prevails a great consensus in educational research that systematic cooperation and target-oriented collaborative actions in an organization create shared cognition and understanding and, as a consequence, increase synergy (e.g. Bereiter, 2002; Goodson & Hargreaves, 2003; Hargreaves & Fink, 2006; Senge et al., 2000). This knowledge is not, however, enough for studying academic success in diverse school organizations and different cultural, national and regional settings. Essential is the interplay between theoretical and empirical knowledge about collaborative learning.  In other words, there is a great need for such knowledge that would explain how collective actions could be implemented in order to concretely create and sustain successful, even innovative (Tubin, 2009), school ethos when operating in professional learning communities (e.g., Gronn, 2008; Harris, 2009). Although the studies in this symposium concentrate on stakeholders in professional learning communities (Leclerc & Moreau, 2008; Leclerc et al., 2009), ultimately, there is a question about learning processes of the students, that is, their outcomes and academic success as eventual focus in all education.

A common theoretical basis on which we examine concrete collaborative measurements and actions is distributed pedagogical leadership (DPL) © 2007 (Jäppinen, 2007, 2009, in print). DPL provides one tool to start to solve the dilemma concerning realization of collaborative learning.  It is the viewpoint and frame with which we want to show how to approach some problematic learning and culturally related issues in three countries from three different continents: Canada, Finland and Israel.

To be exact, DPL is the character and the flexibly developing inner state of a professional learning community. It provides the pedagogical space where the learners’ various needs are faced by the whole personnel. DPL is based on their shared ideas and opinions which are externalized through a common vision and realized through responsible execution of long-range, systematic, target-oriented, collaborative and professional practices. In sum, DPL is a way to think and act together, thus, a living process within a learning society with various amounts of different qualities. These can be defined as ten critical keys: polyphony, interaction, expertise, flexibility, commitment, responsibility, negotiation, decision-making, confidence-based control, and evaluation of one’s own actions. In their realm, DPL embraces such pedagogicalpractices which every member of the educational staff, leadership, teachers, assistants etc., would collaboratively ‘lead’ in jointly agreed ways and to the jointly agreed direction on the grounds of accumulative collective understanding.

The symposium consists of five papers in which collaborative learning is examined through the lens of DPL. Two of them highlight Finnish upper secondary vocational education where students’ transitions from the compulsory education to VET and onwards to working situation are supported through DPL and, in particular, immigrants’ problems in these transitional states. The third and fourth are Canadian papers that cover factors and impact of collaboration in the elementary school environment in a professional learning community, for example, as to literacy learning. The fifth paper introduces two Israelite studies where through polyphony and responsibility successful practices and different ways to action were found in solving heterogeneous learners’ problems.