Abstract

In high schools, principals participate in pedagogical leadership directly and indirectly through the distribution of functions to coordinators or department heads. Several studies indicate that the effectiveness of disciplinary departments, as a structure and impetus for improvement, are closely related to the conditions created by the school principal. This paper presents an exploratory and descriptive study, based on a survey applied to 993 members of Chilean school management teams, municipal (public) and private-subsidized schools, in which 737 corresponded to principals of 692 complete and regular high schools. The survey examined how principals and heads of curricular units characterize such a departmental structure, its organization and management; as well as their expectations and evaluation of departments' contribution to improvement. According to these school directors, the structure of the department serves to promote collaborative work among teachers, which contributes strengthens student learning outcomes, improves curriculum implementation, and increases teacher self-efficacy. In addition, the disciplinary departments are the way in which the head of the curricular unit distributes pedagogical leadership to the department heads. Nevertheless, the department head position is not always available as a resource to lead from the middle and some differences in the work of the departments can be found between secondary schools that created this position and those that did not.