Institutional self-assessment and headship in inclusive schools

Abstract

Educational inclusion is a must for school effectiveness, which is directly related to the quality of the teaching staff and headmasters. The institutional self-assessment appears as a core process to lead struggling schools towards comprehensive goals of socio-educative inclusion. We present a collegial self-assessment process that was carried out between the university and the management teams in primary schools from areas with socio-educational issues. We aim to characterize and improve the leadership skills in those contexts. The methodology (action-research) makes it possible to approach the conditions faced by the management team from a participatory and self-managed perspective. The collegial self-assessment, a process weakly controlled by head teachers, allows the management teams to focus on other complex functions: the internal coordination of their schools, the family-school relationships and the collaborative networks between schools and community. This enables them to deepen into a distributed, pedagogical and contextualized leadership.

Keywords

• dirección escolar
• autoevaluación institucional
• trabajo colaborativo entre escuelas
• entornos desfavorecidos
• inclusión socioeducativa
• investigaciónacción