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Chile has developed the school improvement networks (SINs) strategy to support the work of school leaders. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the functioning and effect of the SINs strategy as perceived by principals and curriculum coordinators across the country.

An adapted version of the Educational Collaborative Network Questionnaire was applied to a sample of 1,723 participants from 1,375 schools distributed in 398 networks. Descriptive, factor and sub-group statistical analyses by school performance categories and by different roles within these schools and networks are presented.

Results indicate that school leaders perceive SINs as an opportunity to work effectively in shared projects that can later be implemented in their own schools. Participants indicate that they can share knowledge in their networks and use it to solve problems in their own schools, which is especially relevant for secondary school leaders who work in difficult circumstances. Results suggest that it is important to facilitate greater autonomy for school leaders in their networks, especially regarding decision making about network goals and activities that are more significant to their contexts.

This is a national study of a recent school improvement strategy, which provides evidence, from the perspective of school leaders, of its strengths and improvement areas. This study shows that despite being in a competitive context, principals and curriculum coordinators value the opportunities to learn from and with others. These results can be of value for other contexts attempting to promote school networks as a means for school and system improvement.

This essay explores the effects of school buildings closure during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on Chilean teachers' and principals' professional role and values, highlighting implications for reconceptualizing educators' professionalism for the post-pandemic era.

Competing versions of Chilean educators' professionalism during the pandemic were analyzed based on government guidelines, national teachers' association statements, news reports and testimonies from teachers and principals collected from webinars.

The guidelines that the ministry issued after school building were required to close motivated educators to challenge a version of professionalism founded on new public management (NPM) policies, which mandated external control and emphasized students' academic outcomes. By challenging the dominant NPM perspective of professionalism, educators advocated for professional autonomy as well as students' and communities' well-being.

This essay offers insights into how the Chilean school system's response to the crisis evidenced competing notions of educators' professionalism. As the pandemic continues to be an ongoing phenomenon, four implications for reconceptualizing educators' professionalism are drawn, which could inform and offer guidance to practitioners and policymakers in the post-pandemic era.

Evidence suggests that networking can be beneficial to enhance learning in challenging contexts, when there is a shared purpose, trustful relationships, and the development of meaningful collaborative practices. In Chile, the adoption of collaborative network practices has faced some challenges due to the long history of neoliberal policies characterised by hierarchical and market governance that promotes competition over collaboration among schools. Using Hood’s (1998) cohesion/regulation matrix, the Chilean education system can be characterized as fatalist, where cooperation among peers is mandated solely to meet external requirements to regulate schools’ and practitioners’ practice. However, in recent years, collaborative projects have been implemented that are framed and supported in an egalitarian culture, highlighting the importance and value of collaboration and support among peers to develop effective teaching practice. By analysing three experiences of networking in Chile, we identify two barriers for networking, distrust and isolation, and analyze the ways in which these networks attempted to overcome them to sustain effective collaboration. The first experience describes the implementation of the collaborative inquiry networks (CIN) methodology. This programme was designed to facilitate the development of networked leadership capacities of principals and curriculum coordinators to support teachers’ practices during COVID-19 in one municipality (Pino-Yancovic & Ahumada, 2020). In the second, we report on a group of principals who developed focussed interventions in their network of urban primary public schools to enhance the exchange of knowledge and practices among network participants. The third centres on the development of a model to enhance teacher leadership and professional learning in Initial Teacher Education through collaboration in a university–school partnership. Finally, we present some lessons to be considered in similar social and policy environments to successfully introduce a collaborative networked approach.

This chapter describes the Chilean market-oriented educational system, which has a marked individualist culture while simultaneously introducing policies and strategies to encourage collaboration among teachers to use research evidence to improve their practices. Using Hood's (1998) cohesion/regulation matrix, we argue that two system approaches are in place in Chile. First, a fatalist way where cooperation among peers is mandated solely to meet rule-bound approaches to regulate schools' and teachers' practice. Second, an egalitarian way promoted by a political discourse that has highlighted the importance and value of collaboration and support among peers to promote effective teaching practice. In this chapter, we inquire how teachers navigate this complex scenario to use evidence to inform their practice by conducting a systematic literature review of studies about Chilean teachers' use of evidence for their teaching practice. The systematic review addressed the following research questions: What is the nature of the literature on the use of evidence for teaching practice among Chilean teachers? What type of evidence is used by Chilean teachers to support their teaching practice? And, to what extent do Chilean teachers engage with peers while using evidence for their teaching practice? Findings show that research on the use of evidence for teaching practice in Chile is still scarce and quite recent, and that teachers face significant challenges to collaborate in a context that systemically rewards competition.