Investigating School Leadership Practice: A Distributed Perspective

TLDR

School leadership involves actions and interactions that unfold together in daily school life. The study outlines a distributed framework for leadership practice, grounded in distributed cognition and activity theory. The study uses in-depth observations, interviews, and social network analysis in Chicago schools to develop a distributed theory of leadership based on four concepts: tasks and functions, task enactment, social distribution, and situational distribution. The authors argue that school leadership is best understood as a distributed practice across social and situational contexts.

Abstract

actions, and interactions of school leadership as they unfold together in the daily life of schools. The research program involves in-depth observations and interviews with formal and informal leaders and classroom teachers as well as a social network analysis in schools in the Chicago metropolitan area. We outline the distributed framework below, beginning with a brief review of the theoretical underpinnings for this work—distributed cognition and activity theory—which we then use to re-approach the subject of leadership practice. Next we develop our distributed theory of leadership around four ideas: leadership tasks and functions, task enactment, social distribution of task enactment, and situational distribution of task enactment. Our central argument is that school leadership is best understood as a distributed practice, stretched over the school’s social and situational contexts.