Principals Who Lead by Dialogue Drive School Success, Study Finds

What makes a school succeed where others struggle? A new study published in the Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research points to an answer that has less to do with budgets or technology and more to do with conversation. Researchers led by Gisela Redondo-Sama of Universitat Rovira i Virgili examined the leadership practices of principals in schools known as Learning Communities, institutions built on a set of scientifically validated practices called Successful Educational Actions. Their findings, drawn from interviews with eleven principals across ten schools, suggest that leadership grounded in egalitarian dialogue, exercised both inside and far beyond the school gates, is a decisive ingredient in raising academic results and strengthening social cohesion.

The schools at the heart of the study are part of an international network spanning Spain, Portugal and Latin American countries including Chile, Brazil and Peru. Many serve socio-economically deprived neighbourhoods, yet they have produced extraordinary outcomes. The European Commission has recommended their model as a successful approach to preventing early school leaving and improving school performance. At the core of the model are seven Successful Educational Actions: Dialogic Gatherings, Interactive Groups, Family Education, Educational Participation of the Community, a Dialogic Model for Prevention and Conflict Resolution, Dialogic Pedagogical Training, and Extended Learning Time. More than 15,000 schools worldwide now run Dialogic Literary Gatherings, one of the most widely replicated actions.

What has remained under-researched, the authors argue, is the specific role of the principal in these transformations. Educational leadership research has long documented the effects of shared, distributed, instructional and transformational leadership models on achievement in areas such as mathematics and reading. Landmark reviews, including the influential analysis by York-Barr and Duke on teacher leadership, identified parental and community involvement as a key dimension of school leadership practice, and OECD studies have concluded that school leaders contribute most when they work successfully beyond their institution’s borders. Dialogic leadership, the process through which the leadership practices of all members of the educational community are created, developed and consolidated, has received far less empirical attention.

To fill that gap, the research team used Communicative Methodology, an approach that treats knowledge as dialogically constructed and requires researchers to contrast scientific expertise with the lived perspectives of social agents. The methodology has a distinguished pedigree, having been deployed in the European Union-funded INCLUD-ED project, which identified the Successful Educational Actions that improved student outcomes across Europe. The team selected ten schools, seven elementary, one special education and two secondary, chosen to capture diversity in size, location, socio-economic status and the length of time each had operated as a Learning Community, from under five years to more than twenty. One school was in Brazil, chosen for the director’s extensive experience in secondary education. Semi-structured, open-ended interviews were conducted with each principal, and the transcripts were analysed inductively, identifying critical episodes and grouping them into themes while attending to both obstacles and transformative dimensions.

The first major finding is that these principals exercise leadership within and beyond the school walls. Marta, who leads a large urban school, described the difference starkly: the defining feature of a Learning Community is its openness, with every action projecting outside the school because relatives and volunteers permanently observe and collaborate in the work, turning the environment into what she called an ally in teaching. Joan, another principal, described going out of the school door every morning to talk with community members about everything from the weather to letters from the town hall they did not understand, building the trust that later draws them into the classroom.

The transformative power of that trust is captured in one of the study’s most vivid episodes. Joan recounted a grandmother who initially dismissed the school project with frustration, reluctant to enter because she had never studied and did not feel safe among teachers. She began by spending time in the library, where activities extended learning time for students and families. Through dialogue with teachers, her participation gradually expanded until she was attending Interactive Groups twice a week and contributing significantly to the school community. Her story illustrates how egalitarian dialogue can convert scepticism into engagement, and engagement into leadership.

The principals also created formal structures that distribute leadership across the whole community. Silvia described the mixed committees, management boards composed of teachers, pupils, parents and other community members, as essential shared spaces where everyone can freely express ideas and, where necessary, take decisions. Since her school became a Learning Community and adopted these committees, pupil performance improved by 58 percent within five years. In Brazil, Ana reported that mixed committees in her large urban school, serving a predominantly African Brazilian community in a very poor area, gave space to the voices of students and families in daily decisions, whereas she previously had to make decisions alone. Patricia, leading a small rural school in Spain, asks parents and even children for advice, sometimes posing the question of what they would do if they were the principal, and finds their contributions sharpen her own reflection.

The second theme concerns how this dialogic leadership produces school improvement and social transformation. The principals described deliberately involving teachers in shaping the school programme; Marta noted that she sometimes leaves her proposals incomplete so that colleagues intervene and take responsibility for writing them, a slower process that yields a programme created by everyone. Leadership grounded in equity also emerged as a recurring principle: the principals spoke of re-situating themselves in more equal relationships built on dialogue, honesty and argumentation, reaching broad consensus through debate with all members of the community. Miren, whose school has run the Learning Communities project since 1995, defined leadership as transmitting trust and enthusiasm and ensuring that everyone feels like a protagonist.

Crucially, the leadership in these schools is anchored in scientific evidence rather than charisma alone. Miren recalled the training session in which researchers explained egalitarian dialogue, cultural intelligence, transformation instead of adaptation, and equality of differences, a sentence in particular striking her: the school you want for your children is the school for all. That experience changed her teaching practices and led her to become principal. Patricia, whose school joined the project only two years ago, reported that reading the scientific evidence made her stronger and better able to put the principles into practice daily. The enthusiasm of the most experienced principals, sustained over twelve and fourteen years, is nourished by results, by what Silvia called credible solutions reflecting the direct experience of children’s success.

The study is not without limits. The evidence rests on ten schools, and the authors acknowledge that a larger sample would strengthen the findings, though the qualitative and communicative approach allowed them to identify transferable elements across urban and rural, public and private, and cross-cultural settings. Newly appointed principals also flagged risks to sustainability: turnover in teaching staff and new teachers unfamiliar with the scientific basis of the project. Yet experienced leaders pointed to a built-in safeguard, because leadership developed among families and pupils endures; mothers from minority groups support new teachers, and children explain to newcomers how the interactive groups and coexistence committees work. The authors conclude that dialogic leadership enhances participants’ sense of self-efficacy and connection to the task, demonstrating that with egalitarian dialogue the school context can be transformed and that efforts to guarantee educational success for all children are worthwhile.

Subject of Research: Dialogic leadership practices of principals in schools as Learning Communities

Article Title: Leading schools through dialogue: the role of principals in schools as Learning Communities

Article References: Leading schools through dialogue: the role of principals in schools as Learning Communities. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-025-00033-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-025-00033-0

Keywords: dialogic leadership, school principals, Learning Communities, Successful Educational Actions, educational leadership, school improvement, community participation, social cohesion, egalitarian dialogue, family engagement, Communicative Methodology, educational equity