The Learning and Innovation Networked Communities (LINC) is a partnership between the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) Ministry of Education, the Emirates College for Advanced Education, and its Continuing Education Center with the objective of transforming schools into centers of excellence in the preparation of teachers and students as cohorts of future-ready agents of change. Teachers in the LINC network (LINCers) work together to:
(a) create great teaching, learning, assessment, and leadership practices that are research-informed, innovative, and home-grown; and
(b) spread great teaching, learning, assessment, and leadership practices from one classroom to another, from one school to another.

LINC practices a bottom-up approach whose starting points are the classroom practices, school improvement, and pedagogic challenges identified by LINC schools through critical friendship. Over 300 teaching assistants, teachers, and school leaders from 13 schools have directly participated in LINC activities, with 113 of them participating in long-term programs that lasted at least 11 weeks.

A 64-question survey, with Likert scale responses ranging from “1” Strongly Disagree to “4” Strongly Agree and comprising 32 questions measuring LINC's impact on their teaching (Subscale I, a-d) and 32 questions measuring LINC's impact on School Conditions (Subscale II, a-d), was administered once at the end of the academic year 23-24. Subscale I focused on the impact on participants’ ability to (a) create new teaching, learning, and assessment practices, (b) build teacher leadership capacity, (c) build practitioner research capacity, and (d) disseminate new teaching, learning, and assessment practices. Subscale II focused on the extent to which schools with LINCers supported the development of teacher leadership through activities that led to:
(a) the creation of new teaching, learning and assessment practices,
(b) teacher leadership and research capacity-building,
(c) practitioner research capacity-building, and
(d) the spread of pedagogic innovations with other schools. LINCers responded to all 64 questions. Non-LINCers responded to only the 32 School Conditions questions.

We received 302 responses from 365 surveys sent to the 13 schools (LINCers, n=57; Non-LINCers, n=245). We measured how the LINC program influenced its members across Subscale I, as reported by LINCers and across both subscales as reported by LINCers vs non-LINCers. The survey tool was highly reliable as the overall internal consistency was very high (Overall α = 0.990, Subscale I α = 0.987; Subscale II α = 0.985).

All eight mean scores on both subscales were significantly above the neutral value (2.5), p < .001, indicating a strong perceived positive impact by LINCers and non-LINCers. LINC had a significantly positive impact on LINCers, especially in creating innovative practices. They consistently experienced stronger school-level support in all four School Conditions than non-LINCers, but especially in spreading practices across schools (Subscale II, d, significant difference (t(291) = 2.25, p = 0.025). For Subscale I, its highest impact was on “Creating new teaching, learning, and assessment practices” (M = 3.50, SD = 0.47). We found a moderate impact on Subscale I (b and c). The lowest impact was on Subscale I (d) “Spreading new teaching, learning, and assessment practices” (M = 3.36, SD = 0.49).

Keywords: Teacher Leadership, Professional development, Teacher Training.