From Professional School Networks to Learning Ecosystems: The Case of Networks for Change in Barcelona

Abstract

Today, education shows an urgent need for transformation to better respond to the complex and interdependent nature of current learning and social challenges we are facing. This chapter is based on the evidence of schools and district initiatives that claim for systemic change with a strong focus on wider interconnection and collaboration between learners, professionals and organizations.

Networks for Change is a programme launched in 2017 by the Barcelona Education Consortium that intends to create professional networks of schools in the city. The programme seeks a deep change in the whole system: to influence how teachers learn from one another to lead a collective transformation of schools, moving towards inclusive, significant and profound learning of all students. To achieve this, the programme articulates 25 territorial networks of schools, spread over the 10 districts in the city of Barcelona, grouping a total of 283 schools (ages 3–18), 1,700 leadership teams and 10,000 teachers. The network sessions are facilitated by one district leader, existing a team of 13 facilitators in the programme. Each school assigns an internal and volunteering leadership team that is responsible to assist to the network meetings, so as to empower internal change processes in schools.

The present study evaluates the impact of the programme on the development of territorial networks, as well as on the changes emerged in school communities. The instruments used combine a quantitative and qualitative approach including a questionnaire for teams of leaders involved in the programme, a questionnaire for teachers from schools and a focus group with programme facilitators of the 25 networks.

The main results show that the Networks for Change programme is already becoming a response to the widely contrasted need to weave sustainable relationships between teachers from different schools in the system at the same time that it is strengthening the collaborative capacities of educational actors in the city’s neighbourhoods and territories. Likewise, and to take a step further in the development of the programme, it is suggested emphasizing the increase of transversality in the networks as cross-sector collaboration, distributing the leadership of the programme through its actors and establishing direct ways for the impact to schools and their transformation. Right now, the network mainly fulfils a function of generating learning among its participants, although the desired horizon is to extend this learning to the entire ecosystem and at the same time generate systemic change in the neighbourhoods in order to enhance and document real impact on learners.

Citation

Díaz-Gibson, J., Zaragoza, M.C. and Sabat, M.C. (2022), "From Professional School Networks to Learning Ecosystems: The Case of Networks for Change in Barcelona", Armstrong, P.W. and Brown, C. (Ed.) School-to-School Collaboration: Learning Across International Contexts, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 187-207. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80043-668-820221012