Mireia Tintoré, lecturer at the Faculty of Education, gave two talks on 28 January and 17 February at the thematic seminar organised by the Educational Transformation Laboratory, part of the Department of Education of the Government of Catalonia. In both talks, she advocated distributed leadership as an organisational model for educational centres and building trust in school settings.

The talk on 28 January aimed to shift the organisational vision of educational centres towards distributed leadership. “Today’s educational leadership should focus on teaching and learning,” the lecturer said, “in fact, learning should be the driver for change and development for all members of the educational community.”

As Tintoré explained in her talk, during the 1980s, the most common educational leadership theory was instructional leadership, which emphasises the role of the school principal in improving students’ academic outcomes. However, in the 1990s, there was an explosion of transformational leadership, where the leader is seen as the catalyst that drives change in organisations. “Today, several researchers have proposed leadership for learning, a new type of leadership that encompasses the most positive aspects of both perspectives,” she added.

In her talk on 17 February, Tintoré advocated that building trust in the educational community would lead to effective collaboration. “There are multiple ways to distribute leadership and create cultures of collaboration,” she said, “but building trust is common to all, which makes it possible for the foreseen changes to take place within the community.”