Training Future School Leaders through Professional Learning Communities

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-599-7_30How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Professional Learning Communities; School Leadership; Transformational Leadership

Abstract

The training of future school leaders is a major challenge for the current education system, given two important aspects:

1. Social trends reshaping education systems, such as digitalization, inequality, demographic change, migration, and the aftereffects of the pandemic (OECD, 2025b); and

2. Studies on the impact of principals on student outcomes and on school culture in general (Grissom, 2021; Leithwood et al., 2004).

Thus, the development of leadership competencies becomes a major responsibility not only of principal training systems, but also of school leaders themselves. This article investigates the way in which the development of professional learning communities for principals (school leaders) in education responds to the demands of preparing flexible, transformational, and sustainability-oriented leadership.

The research is based on the theoretical premises of professional learning communities (Stoll & all., 2006) and on modern theories of educational leadership ( Bush, 2011; Senge, 2017; Fullan, 2001; 2005).

Purpose of the research was to analyze the need for professional learning communities for school leaders.

Participant was 25 persons holding leadership positions (principlas and members of the school administration board) from various schools in Brașov (Central area), Romania.

Methods used: participative observation, interviews, and questionnaires, used within a mixed-methods research design.

The analysis of the data led us to the conclusion that, for the effective and sustainable training of educational leaders, professional communities learning is important because these communities enable, in an efficient, personalized, and solution-oriented way, the development of sustainable ways of thinking, acting, and feeling.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this license to share adapted material derived from this chapter or parts of it.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Mihaela Voinea
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/07/31
TI  - Training Future School Leaders through Professional Learning Communities
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Management and Entrepreneurial Leadership for K-12 Education Excellence (LEADK12 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 466
EP  - 476
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-599-7_30
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-599-7_30
ID  - Voinea2026
ER  -