quality (Leithwood & Louis, 2011). In Spain school principals has had limited opportunity to leadership, to depend on your election by the School Council (Bolívar & Moreno, 2006). However, in convergence with research and educational policy (OECD, 2008), currently becomes a professional role, as school leader (Bolívar et al., 2011). Toolsare required to assess the exercise of pedagogical leadership. It has been used (Gago, 2006) the “Principal Instructional Leadership Rating Scale” (PIMRS), carried out three decades ago (Hallinger, 2011).A new assessment for principals developed by researchers at Vanderbilt University and the University of Pennsylvania (Porter et al., 2008) has the potential to clarify what is meant by educational leadership and how it can be measured: Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education (VAL-ED). Our research team has made the translation, validation and adaptation to spanish version, as well as its subsequent implementation, on whose process and results shares this contribution.

VAL-ED measures principals’ performance at the intersection of six core components (High standards for student learning; rigorous curriculum; quality instruction; culture of learning and professional behavior; connections to external communities; and performance accountability) and six key processes (planning, implementing, supporting, advocating, communicating and monitoring). The assessment instrument is composed of 72 questions, in which each respondent is asked to evaluate the principal’s performance on 72 behaviors. Respondents rate performance on a scale from 1 for “ineffective” to 5 for “outstandingly effective” after considering data on which the evaluation is based, such as school documents or personal evaluation. Their applications are supported with evidence of validity and applicability satisfactory(Goldring et al., 2009; Porter et al., 2010). The measurement’s developers acknowledge that VAL-ED still has its limitations. For example, it only measures perceptions of a principal’s performance. It should correlate the principal’s performances with the learning of students and school improvement.

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