Distributed leadership: Growing strong communities of practice in early childhood centres

Abstract

This paper explores how leadership roles that are distributed across participants and mostly non-hierarchical (Bennett, Wise, Woods, and Harvey, 2003; Mayrowetz, 2008) can build strong communities of practice. In early childhood centres this community will include teachers, children, family and whānau ('extended family'). Using Wenger's (1998) notion of communities of practice, the paper analyses the data from a case study of a professional development programme focussed on developing 'leaderful' centres to ascertain the relationship between distributed leadership practices and communities of practice. Through the analysis the paper concludes that qualified teachers engaging in a model of distributed leadership play a significant role in building strong communities of practice and that further research is needed to confirm the importance of qualifications.