CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS FOR THE TRANSFORMATION OF SCHOOL CULTURE IN LEARNING COMMUNITIES

This article develops a conceptual framework to explain how teacher professional development, school culture, and learning communities interact in educational improvement. A hermeneutic review, guided by PRISMA principles, was conducted using inclusion criteria that privileged the last decade, sources from the Americas and Europe, and materials from indexed journals and university repositories. The corpus comprised six journal articles, two national academic works, and four international studies. Findings indicate that professional development is most effective when situated in authentic school problems, organized collaboratively, and supported by distributed instructional leadership. School culture operates as an enabling/limiting context for the uptake of new practices, while learning communities provide the organizational scaffold for knowledge circulation and the reduction of teacher isolation. As contributions, the study presents a conceptual map, a theory-of-change model, and mechanisms map that link inputs, processes, and intermediate and final outcomes through continuous improvement (PDSA) cycles. Implications include governance arrangements that institutionalize co-planning time, peer observation with protocols, and formative assessment. Limitations relate to database access and language constraints.