Reseña bibliográfica: Gairín-Sallán, J. (Coord.) (2024). Dirección y liderazgo de los centros educativos. Naturaleza, desarrollo y práctica profesional. Narcea. 302 pp.
DOI
10.22550/2174-0909.4440
Abstract
School management is one of the most important factors in the quality of educational centres as the management is responsible for ensuring that the organisation functions correctly and fully meets the demands of people and of the society of which the centre is a part. The debate about the desired management model for school settings and how it relates to leadership are topics that still await political and professional decisions, although it could be said that management centres more on the tasks to be performed while leadership relates to how to ensure that people get involved in carrying them out. The work reviewed here upholds the need to maintain and foster models for studying the leading managers, making known the strengths and weaknesses of the proposals relating to the managerial role and leadership. It considers the impact of managers on the functioning of the institution on the basis of the projects that they implement, the relations they promote, and the stability that they give to the institution’s project. This publication comprises ten chapters, arranged in three sections, with the involvement of thirteen authors of recognised standing in Spain. The first section, with the title “Nature and meaning of managers as institutional authorities”, comprises the first three chapters. In the first chapter, “Management and leadership: two faces of the same coin?”, the coordinator of the publication, Gairín Sallán, examines in depth the link between management and leadership and considers the possibilities that present themselves in organisational practice, arguing that while this approach is no easy task, it is a necessary one in an international context in which traditions and languages with overlapping meanings cross. In the second chapter, “The managerial role in the national and international context”, López Rupérez analyses a significant part of the empirical evidence for the impact of school management on student performance, considering the professionalisation of the managerial role from an international perspective as an essential aspect of policies centred on school management, and presenting a systematic analysis of the evolution of the Spanish school management model in the different laws that have regulated it since the return to democracy. In chapter three, “Evolution of leadership in the national and international context”, Tintoré- Espuny and Gairín-Sallán offer an analysis of recent studies on educational leadership and their most important contributions at a national and international level, centring on the principal reports and research groups referring to what has been happening in Spain. Section two, “The professional development of managers”, contains chapters four, five, and six. In chapter four, “The initial training of school management in Spain”, Álvarez-Fernández and Villa-Sánchez consider entry requirements, merit-based competition, competences, and experience in management and leadership, training before and during the selection process, the managerial body, and the professionalisation of school management, reflecting on the importance of and need for competent managers who perform the role of leadership with experience, training, and knowledge. To do so, they suggest possible proposals and realistic options aimed at improving the exercise of an ever more necessary and essential leadership, taking into account the level of complexity and need for change that society demands. For her part, Tintoré-Espuny, in chapter five, “The continuous training of managers”, considers the continuous training of school leaders in depth, focussing on strategies of support, retention, motivation, and intensification, and noting how training should be approached if its aim is to build loyalty in people who are key to improving education systems. In chapter six, “Handover and transition in the management of schools”, Antúnez-Marcos and Silva-García reflect on management succession in educational centres. They see the transition as a critical period in the life of the institution, and they emphasise the need to be fully aware of the consequences for those who receive the position, who must undertake and fully and properly handle a change of professional role, and for those who leave it, who must also be aware of the responsibilities that they take on to ensure that the transitional period is satisfactory and efficient. Section three, with the title “The professional practice of managers”, contains the last four chapters. In chapter seven, “Managers in vulnerable settings”, Murillo-Torrecilla and Azorín- Abellán address the decisive role of school management for students’ integral development and for the quality of the teachers and schools located in vulnerable settings. These settings require a different perspective, not just focussed on learning and high-quality teaching but also on equity and social justice. In chapter eight, “Managing professional training”, Espinós-Espinós and Andrés-Villena condense the distinguishing aspects, from the point of view of management and organisation, of an educational centre that provides professional training (PT). They first contextualise current PT on the basis of the recent publication of the professional training act and of the royal decree approving the regulations that implement it. They then reflect on the future prospects of this training pathway. In chapter nine, “Managing rural centres. Specific features of management in these settings”, Cantón-Mayo presents a general overview of rural education, before addressing the particular features of the management of rural centres. He reviews the entry requirements and the lack of competition in applications for the post of head and ends with a ten-point plan for the improvement of the functioning of rural management, in which two questions stand out: enthusiasm and commitment on the one hand, and connection with the surrounding context on the other, to generate satisfaction as a general indicator of educational quality in this way. Finally, in chapter ten, “Networks of managers for improvement”, Gairín-Sallán, Galdames- Calderón, and López-Crespo address online work, recognising that networks favour change, offer a medium for improving the exercise of management, leadership, and shared responsibility, and informing about the known networks of educational managers and leaders that must act as a reference for leading managers to be able to project their work and concerns beyond their everyday activity. All of this is collected in an interesting work aimed at managers, academics and researchers, assessors, teachers, and people in charge of education systems. A work that seeks to disseminate the existing knowledge, providing theoretical and practical frameworks that support their intervention in education centres. It asserts the need to encourage and maintain models for studying managers and leaders that go beyond mere structural analysis and advance in the description and knowledge of the complex human dynamics on which they act. It also presents advances in this topic, extending to models of distributed management with transformative leaders, centred on learning processes and able to promote more efficient, inclusive, safe, healthy, sustainable, and personally and socially useful educational centres.
Citación recomendada | Recommended citation
García-Martín, S. (2025). Gairín-Sallán, J. (Coord.) (2024). Dirección y liderazgo de los centros educativos. Naturaleza, desarrollo y práctica profesional [Management and leadership in educational centres. Nature, development, and professional practice]. Narcea. 302 pp.. Revista Española de Pedagogía, 83(290), 261-270. https://doi.org/10.22550/2174-0909.4440
Licencia Creative Commons | Creative Commons License
Esta obra está bajo una licencia internacional Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial 4.0.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
