Abstract

Educational improvement involves interactions among individuals in school contexts, which entails leadership roles and their potential distribution. In this exploratory-descriptive study we use Social Network Analysis (SNA) with a sample of three secondary schools in Chile to examine the relationships between members of the Language and Mathematics departments, identifying those who play leadership roles for educational improvement processes. Findings show that patterns of interactions among teachers varied by type of collaborative action, where in some schools the interactions among teachers are scarce between and within the departments analyzed, and in others they are more intense and frequent. Whereas the role of department heads is important, in some cases teachers who do not have that position may even have a more prominent role in influencing school improvement processes. Findings lead us to conclude that SNA is a useful technique for depicting a school's social capital, enabling the identification of aspects in need of attention to increase distributed leadership as leverage for school improvement.