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

The research, led by Julio Navío-Marco, Diego Ardura, and Arturo Galán of the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia in Madrid, was conducted within an Applied Statistics in Education course at a major hybrid university. Students were offered the option of tackling one of their assignments individually or in teams of two or three. After the term ended, the entire cohort was surveyed with an instrument designed specifically for the study, measuring perceived utility, anticipated difficulties, skills acquired, and—for those who chose teams—the demands of the experience and its contribution to building learning communities. The design was ex-post-facto, meaning the researchers analyzed choices and perceptions after the fact rather than manipulating conditions, and the survey was resent weekly until every student had responded.

The statistical machinery behind the study was substantial. Exploratory factor analyses confirmed that the survey’s scales were robust: the 13-item perceived utility scale explained nearly 65 percent of item variance with a reliability of 0.97 on McDonald’s omega, while the difficulty, skills, effort, and learning community scales all showed similarly strong psychometric properties. To compare perceptions across students, the team used repeated measures ANOVA with Greenhouse–Geisser corrections for violated sphericity, and effect sizes were estimated with eta-squared and Cohen’s d. But the most revealing analysis came from a decision tree algorithm called CHAID—Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detector—which segmented students into groups based on the variables that best predicted whether they would choose teamwork again.

The first CHAID model, predicting which modality students actually chose for the assignment, classified 72.1 percent of the sample correctly. Its verdict was unambiguous: the single best predictor of choosing teamwork was whether students believed collaboration was necessary for their education. Students scoring above three on that item were far more likely to opt for a team. Among those who saw teamwork as less essential, the next fork was performance—those hoping to improve their results leaned toward group work—while students who neither valued teamwork for learning nor sought performance gains chose teams only when their schedules allowed it. In short, students who preferred working alone generally did not see collaborative tasks as essential, did not expect performance benefits, and had limited availability.

The perceived benefits that separated team players from solo workers were strikingly consistent. Students who chose groups believed teamwork would make them more efficient (d = 0.63), more engaged (d = 0.58), higher performing (d = 0.51), and more responsible for their own learning (d = 0.51), with motivation and the perceived indispensability of teamwork for their education showing similarly moderate effects. Across the whole sample, the highest-rated contributions were improvements in communication skills, the generation of new knowledge, meeting educational needs, getting to know peers, reducing the isolation of distance learning, and creating a learning community. On the skills side, only employability-oriented competencies showed a meaningful difference between the groups, with a moderate effect size of 0.48—a signal that students drawn to teamwork are, at least in part, investing in their professional futures.

The negative side of the ledger was dominated by practical friction. Scheduling and availability difficulties and uneven member involvement topped the list of anticipated problems, while communication challenges ranked lowest. Students who worked individually rated nearly every anticipated difficulty higher than their team-working peers, with the largest gaps involving remote communication (d = 0.34), lack of commitment (d = 0.35), and participation in meetings (d = 0.36). The researchers point to the persistent specter of the free rider—the teammate who coasts on others’ effort—as a key driver of distrust, echoing a long line of studies identifying unequal participation as the most frequent drawback of online group work. Notably, not knowing teammates in advance was not a significant barrier in either group, suggesting that the real obstacle is not unfamiliarity but confidence that everyone will pull their weight.

The second decision tree, modeling whether team-working students would choose collaboration again, was even more accurate, classifying 91.4 percent of cases correctly. Its master variable was the value students placed on helping peers and benefiting from the resulting feedback. Students who rated mutual assistance above three points were highly likely to return to teams, and that likelihood rose further among those interested in building learning communities. For students with intermediate motivation to help and be helped, the prospect of improving grades tipped the balance, while those with low mutual-help motivation rarely persisted—unless they believed teamwork would lighten their workload. When the researchers compared students eager to repeat teamwork with those who preferred to retreat to individual work, the effect sizes on learning community perceptions were enormous, reaching d = 2.46 for the belief that teamwork enables mutual assistance among peers.

These results land at a particularly consequential moment for teacher education. The students in the study are future teachers, and their attitudes toward collaboration today will shape the classroom practices of tomorrow. Previous research has shown that many educators receive little formal training in teamwork pedagogy and are often unsure how to teach collaborative skills, which imposes additional transaction costs on already stretched instructors. The Spanish team argues that if teachers themselves are not convinced of the intrinsic value of teamwork, they will struggle to sell it to their students. Their data suggest that awareness and training efforts should be concentrated most intensely on future educators who gravitate toward individual work to avoid the difficulties of coordination and trust.

The theoretical grounding of the study connects these findings to a deeper tradition. Teamwork, the authors note, functions as a Vygotskian Zone of Proximal Development in which students learn from peers as well as instructors, and it aligns with Bandura’s social cognitive theory, in which learning emerges through dynamic, mutual interaction with others. In distance environments, collaboration also demands self-regulation, and the study taps into the emerging concept of socially shared regulation of learning, where teams collectively manage their own processes. The Community of Inquiry framework—teaching, cognitive, and social presence—provides the scaffolding for the instructor’s role: defining group sizes, assigning warm-up team-building activities in scarce face-to-face sessions, supplementing with online interactive games, and assessing individual contributions within team projects.

The practical prescriptions that follow are concrete. Instructors in hybrid settings should reserve precious in-person time for tasks best done face to face—team building, strategic discussion, defining objectives—while providing detailed written instructions for the online component, using synchronous meetings and interactive software deliberately, and evaluating both the process and the product through meeting minutes, peer and self-evaluations, and progress reports. Preparatory measures that build interpersonal familiarity before teams begin could directly address the trust deficit the data exposed. The authors also flag promising lines for future research: identifying which assignments suit blended environments best, using teamwork to reduce the isolation that remains a chronic weakness of distance education, and training future educators to champion collaboration with their own students. What the study makes clear is that teamwork in online universities is not a default that happens when students are placed in groups—it is a perception-driven choice, won or lost in the minds of learners long before the first meeting is scheduled.

Subject of Research: Perceptions of teamwork skill development among future teachers in hybrid and online university education

Article Title: Teamwork skills development in hybrid and online universities: the perspective of the future teachers

Article References: Teamwork skills development in hybrid and online universities: the perspective of the future teachers. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-025-00032-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-025-00032-1

Keywords: teamwork, blended learning, online education, collaborative learning, teacher training, employability skills, learning communities, CHAID decision tree, free rider problem, self-regulated learning, higher education, distance learning