Exploring school leadership and structural school characteristics in professional learning communities: a multilevel analysis

Schools are increasingly seen as places for both student and teacher learning. As professional learning communities (PLCs), they are promising contexts for teachers’ professional development. Those learning communities are characterized by reflective dialogue, deprivatized practice, and collective responsibility. School leadership is an important factor in the success of PLCs. In this study, we relate instructional and transformational leadership to the PLC characteristics. We also include several school characteristics (school size, student population, and alternative/traditional school) in our model. In total, 495 experienced teachers from 48 Flemish (Belgium) primary schools participated in the survey. Through conducting multilevel regression analyses, we found that both types of leadership matter in relation to PLCs. Both are significant for reflective dialogue, whereas transformational leadership is significant for collective responsibility and instructional leadership for deprivatized practice. Regarding the school characteristics, teachers in alternative schools score significantly higher compared to teachers from traditional schools for all characteristics