This study aims to evaluate the leadership practices of a sample of secondary school principals in the Madrid region. An attempt will be made to provide some insights into their professional profile, their performance of leadership tasks, and the different elements that define their leadership model. An online questionnaire was used to collect their opinions on the day-to-day performance of their leadership role, as well as on the factors that influence their leadership style. From a methodological point of view, a quantitative approach is used within an interpretative framework, given that the emphasis is not on the generalisation of results but on understanding how school principals operate in their particular context. Results revealed that instructional leadership in Spain is still seen as a challenging goal for principals. This is closely in line with the bureaucratic nature of the headship role in Spanish schools.

Teacher Leadership Teams (TLTs) are cross-functional teams, and thus knowledge integration is central to their teaming. Importantly, the existing literature maintains that cross-functional teams apply the traverse or transcend approach differently to integrate divergent knowledge, but few studies have directly focused on it within the context of TLTs. Studies on leadership teams in schools have highlighted political and/or cultural perspectives and mainly stressed team/organizational conditions that might influence the TLT process of using two knowledge integration approaches. Therefore, our research analyzed how one TLT employed two knowledge integration approaches in consideration of team/organizational conditions. More specifically, we conducted qualitative research using the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory as an analytic lens. We identified that the TLT used traverse, transcend, and mixed approaches, and that its context influenced the team’s hybrid use by determining when the team utilized each approach. We believe that our findings contribute to revealing TLTs’ actual knowledge integration process by empirically examining one TLT’s use of knowledge integration approaches. Our findings also contribute to developing a more comprehensive framework to understand TLT knowledge integration by addressing existing research from political and cultural perspectives and suggesting further areas of focus (i.e., functional conditions) for future research.