There is a wide ongoing debate about the professional character of the teaching activity. One of the positions in this debate affirms that a profession is characterized by the existence of people regarded as professional models or leaders, something that cannot be found among teachers. To investigate the existence of professional leaders a brief questionnaire was submitted to 700 teachers working in the town of Queimados (State of Rio de Janeiro), of which 650 were returned. The interviewees were asked to name a teacher to whom they resort when facing a " teaching" or " education" problem. The wide dispersion of the answers indicates that, in fact, there are no professional leaders here. Separating the data reveals that the indications tend to occur within each school unit (61.85%), although many occur outside their units (36.46%). The first conclusion is that the school unit, as a psychosocial group, requires a more careful examination because teachers only exist in it and through it. This group determines the higher or lower effectiveness of their work, and the higher the cohesion the more satisfied they are, even if the result of their actions is not what others regard as adequate, particularly the social agents external to the immediate group. The inexistence of professional leaders is evidence that we deal here with a kind of work whose rules and knowledges are those of the immediate groups, which lead as to say that the school is the psychosocial unit to be investigated in order to understand the resistance to changes.
Teaching profession; Leadership; Psychosocial group