2: Collaborative Inquiry in Challenging Contexts

The Chilean Ministry of Education has promoted the SIN strategy with the purpose of mobilizing collaborative practices between schools and forging a new relationship of collaboration between ministry supervisors and schools. In 2016, Ministry guidelines for SIN identified three general stages of development for these networks, starting with an implementation stage focused on the exchange of practices; then it was expected that they would progress to a community of practice focused on addressing internal school process through joint actions among network members; and finally, they would reach a professional learning community stage focused on creating new knowledge for educational improvement and social transformations in their own context, meaning that different schools from a similar territory will be able to build a professional community and use this knowledge to address challenges that they are facing in their own schools. MINEDUC guidelines seem to be using the idea of professional learning communities and applying it to school networks, without an explicit and rigorous theoretical background about networking or school-to-school collaboration.