School leaders play a critical role in setting the conditions, providing ongoing support, and modeling a learner stance in order to optimize teacher professional development and peer coaching and mentoring initiative in Santiago, Chile offers a unique opportunity to deepen our understanding about the role leaders playin supporting, sustaining, and scalingprofessional learning for teachers.
In 2017, the Principal Leadership Institute, one of the Leadership Programs of the Graduate School of Education, entered a two-year partnership with Centro de Desarrollo de Liderazgo Educativo (CEDLE) at Universidad Diego Portales in Chile to design one of the first peer mentoring and coaching initiatives in the country. During the pilot year, the Pedagogical Mentoring program was implemented in five schools with 15 mentorteachers and leaders. Because Pedagogical Mentoring was a new method of professional development for the Chilean schools that participated in the project, we can learn a great novice perspectives about what it takes to develop a sustainable model of peer mentorship and about the power and potential of peer coaching to support school improvement efforts.
Our analysis confirms that school leaders, including principals and teacher-leaders, contributed greatly to the successful implementation of this initiative as well as the reciprocal learning for all participants. Although peer mentoring and instructional coaching are not new concepts in the United States, our work can be informed by focusing on the role of leaders in executing these professional development efforts. This investigation of the specific leadership actions carried out by Chilean educators in an early attempt to implement Pedagogical Mentoring provides a new lens through which to understand the conditions necessary to foster a successful coaching model in the United States that is designed for long-term, sustainable impact.