Distributed Leadership: Toward a Theory of School Leadership Practice

James P. Spillane, Richard Halverson and John B. Diamond

IPR working papers from Institute for Policy Resarch at Northwestern University

Abstract: School-level conditions, and school leadership in particular, are key in any effort to fundamentally change instruction. While new organizational structures and new leadership roles matter to instructional innovation efforts, what seems most critical are the ways in which leaders enact their roles and interact with school personnel and clients. Yet, the practice of school leadership has received scant attention in the empirical literature. Building on activity theory and theories of distributed cognition, this paper develops a distributed perspective on school leadership as a conceptual frame for studying leadership practice. The goal of this work is to make the "black box" of leadership practice in elementary schools more transparent by revealing and analyzing how together leaders think and practice to improve teachers' practice. The distributed perspective goes beyond considering a division of labor for leadership functions to the realization that the thinking and practice of school leadership is enabled and constrained by a range of leaders and by the material and symbolic artifacts in the environment. A distributed perspective treats the situation not simply as an influence on practice but as an integral and constituting component of that practice.

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