The Virtual Community of Practice for School Principals: A Professional Development Method

Abstract

In an education system that is constantly evolving, school principals play a pivotal role, hence the importance of continuing their professional development in order to acquire the necessary competencies to perform effectively throughout their professional careers. This article examines the characteristics of a community of practice (CoP) as a professional development approach with a group of school principals (N = 10) who participated in a virtual CoP for one year. The corpus from the semi-structured interviews was analysed by considering the four components of Wenger’s (2005) social theory of learning, namely, meaning, practice, community, and identity. Our results also showed the levers of this support method during its implementation.