Distributed Leadership

This paper examines a number of promising principal preparation programs to identify lessons for improving the impact of principals on student perrmance.

This dissertation investigates how relational trust manifests within schools that have recently
enacted the distributed leadership framework, a program implementation by the Penn
Center for Educational Leadership.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of distributed leadership (DL) on school effectiveness (SE) in junior secondary schools in Katsina State, Nigeria. The study also investigates if teachers’ commitment (TC) mediates the relationship between DL and SE.

This paper seeks to estimate the effect that Career Leader (CL) program has had on teachers’ career decisions, specifically their decisions to stay in a specific school district or to remain in the teaching field.

Over the past 10 years, the Southern Regional Education Board has helped states and public universities across the region evaluate their state policies for preparing school principals who are leaders of instruction. This benchmark report reviews the past decade and looks at 10 learning-centered leadership indicators to gauge how far states have come and how far they need to go in selecting, preparing and supporting leaders of change.

Heroic models of leadership based on the role of the principal have been supplemented by an emerging recognition of the value of ‘distributed leadership’. The work of effective senior leadership teams (SLTs) is an important manifestation of distributed leadership, but there has been only limited research addressing the relationship between this model and leadership teams in education.

In this chapter of "Distributed leadership: Different perspectives" the authors take a small step towards addressing such questions by investigating the association between the distribution of leadership to teachers and instructional change in schools.

This paper discusses the search for a “magic metric” in education: an index/number that would be generally accepted as the most efficient descriptor of school’s performance in a district.

Through real-life single and multiple case studies, This book addresses how principals and their staffs struggle with the challenge of shared leadership, how they encourage teacher growth and development, and how shared leadership can lead to higher levels of student learning. 

The belief that working in teams makes us more creative and productive is so widespread that when faced with a challenging new task, leaders are quick to assume that teams are the best way to get the job done. Getting agreement is the leader’s job, and they must be willing to take great personal and professional risks to set the team’s direction. And if the leader isn’t disciplined about managing who is on the team and how it is set up, the odds are slim that a team will do a good job.

This report examines practices in teacher and principal development in the United States in 2010. It looks at ineffective approaches as well as those models that show promise for improving educator and student performance.

The first paper describes the theory of action and essential components of the DL Program. It presents a brief overview of how the DL Program was initially conceived and operationalized, how it was replicated for its second and current implementation effort, and lessons learned across implementations.

This review summarizes the evidence for the model’s efficacy in explaining how principals and teachers together influence school practices and effectiveness.

The idea of improving schools by developing professional learning communities is currently in vogue. People use this term to describe every imaginable combination of individuals with an interest in education—a grade-level teaching team, a school committee, a high school department, an entire school district, a state department of education, a national professional organization, and so on.

Leadership is what is done, not who is doing it. The leadership work blurs the lines between teachers and administrators. Leading Together introduces a collective approach to progress, process, and programs to help build the conditions in which strong leadership can flourish and student outcomes improve. Explore the Collective Leadership Development Model for School Improvement.

Applying an analytic model to better understand collective leadership development, this study examines three high schools: one urban, one suburban, and one rural. Each school's unique structure and context tests the model's explanatory power.

Effective Instructional Leadership Teams can be integral to helping underperforming schools strengthen their leadership, professional learning systems and core instruction.

The purpose of this study is to reveal the extent to which different leadership models in education are studied, including the change in the trends of research on each model over time, the most prominent scholars working on each model, and the countries in which the articles are based. 

The author provides a new framework for understanding leadership practice. The work of leaders will increasingly be shaped by three overriding but contradictory themes: design; distribution; and disengagement. These are the `architecture' of school and educational leadership.

This paper ties together evidence drawn from several extensive reviews of the educational leadership literature that included instructional leadership as a key construct. 

In this chapter, the authors synthesize the results of a series of analyses of empirical data on distributed leadership and school improvement. The studies centered on the impact of new state policies that sought to create broader and deeper leadership capacity in schools as a vehicle for stimulating and sustaining school improvement.

This longitudinal study examines the effects of collaborative leadership on school improvement and student reading achievement in 192 elementary schools in one state in the USA over a 4-year period

This chapter describes findings from a series of related quantitative studies in which we sought to understand how leadership contributes to school capacity for improvement and student learning.

This article reviews the evolution of instructional leadership as a model for principal practice, examines barriers to its successful enactment, and proposes strategies

The article underlines how, within this conception, distributed leadership operates as a network
of strong cells organized through cohesive diversity and emergent development rather than mechanical
alignment and predictable delivery.

This article aims to address and explain the conceptual ambiguity surrounding distributed leadership.

This book anchors distributed leadership in the core work of instruction and argues that to be most effective, leadership distribution has to be first and foremost focus upon improving learners outcomes

what is distributed leadership? What does the evidence say? And, can it work for your school? Teacher Magazine asked Professor Alma Harris.

If we think about leadership as being confined to only those in positions of authority then we are willfully ignoring the leadership talent and capability of many others. If leadership is fundamentally about influence, then within any school there are many sources of influence, both formal and informal.

This article takes a contemporary look at distributed leadership in practice by drawing upon empirical evidence from a large-scale project in the USA. Initially, it considers the existing knowledge base on distributed leadership and questions some of the assertions and assumptions in recent accounts of the literature. 

This Wallace paper summarizes a decade of the foundation’s research in school leadership to identify five critical roles for school principals to be effective.

The Visible Learning research synthesizes findings from 1,400 meta-analyses of 80,000 studies involving 300 million students, into what works best in education.

This longitudinal study examines the effects of distributed leadership on school improvement and growth in student math achievement in 195 elementary schools in one state over a 4-year period.

A central premise in the literature on leadership highlights its central role in organizational change. In light of the strength of this conceptual association, it is striking to note the paucity of large-scale empirical studies that have investigated how leadership impacts performance improvement in organizations over time. Indeed evidence-based conclusions concerning the impact of leadership on organizational change are drawn largely from case studies and cross-sectional surveys.

Learning communities serve a variety of education constituencies, beginning with grade-level or subject-matter teams, vertical-grade or subject-band teams, school leadership teams, cadres of principals, or teams of employees in district offices.

The specific purposes of this article are to identify and synthesize the empirical research on how leadership influences student achievement and to provide evidence on how school leaders should direct their efforts.

This article examines the relationship between the time principals spent on different types of activities and school outcomes, including student achievement, teacher and parent assessments of the school, and teacher satisfaction

The present study explores the relationship between distributed leadership and teachers' organizational commitment. Semi-structured interviews with teachers and school leaders of secondary schools were conducted

In this study the relationship between school leadership and teachers'
organizational commitment is examined by taking into account a distributed leadership
perspective.

This report is a comprehensive and research-based framework outlining the conditions necessary for transformational school leaders to succeed. It offers a framework of conditions that can help districts enable great school leadership.

The authors propose a conceptual framework of equitable leadership practice, describing three drivers to catalyze organizational growth in 10 high-leverage equitable practices designed to mitigate disparities for non-dominant students.

This report analyses whether and how highperforming systems have supported the subject expertise of their elementary school teachers.

School based leadership is an increasingly complex task that requires leaders to find ways to spread responsibility throughout organizations to achieve goals. This dissertation research is an exploratory study in the field of sustainability of distributed leadership at Capital High School, a large urban high school.

In this report, the development of altering concepts of school leadership over a period of about 4 decades is sketched.

For purposes of the Ontario Leadership Framework (OLF), leadership is defined as the exercise of influence on organizational members and diverse stakeholders toward the identification and achievement of the organization’s vision and goals. For aspiring leaders, this framework provides important insights about what they will need to learn to be successful. Those already exercising leadership will find the framework a useful tool for self-reflection and self-assessment.

This study aimed to improve our understanding of the nature, causes, and consequences of school leader efficacy, including indirect influences on student learning.

This study aimed to estimate the impact of collective, or shared, leadership on key teacher variables and on student achievement. As well, it inquired about the relative contribution of different sources of such leadership and whether differences among patterns of collective leadership were related to differences in student achievement

This chapter of "A New Agenda for Research in Educational Leadership" book presents a broad agenda to help strengthen the extent, quality, and clarity of the latter source of knowledge -- empirical research on leadership. 

Using meta-analytic review techniques, this study synthesized the results of 79
unpublished studies about the nature of transformational school leadership (TSL) and its
impact on the school organization, teachers, and students.

In 2008 the authors published an article in this journal entitled Seven Strong Claims about Successful School Leadership (Leithwood, Harris, and Hopkins 2008). This article revisits each of the seven claims, summarising what was said about each in the original publications, weighing each of the claims considering recent empirical evidence, and proposing revisions or refinements as warranted.

This study inquired about patterns of leadership distribution, as well as which leadership functions were performed by whom, the characteristics of nonadministrative leaders, and the factors promoting and inhibiting the distribution of leadership functions. 

In this study, the six aforementioned variables are added to one model focusing on both the direct effects instructional and distributed leadership have on teacher job satisfaction and self-efficacy, and the indirect effects through the mediation variables of supportive school culture and teacher collaboration. 

In about a decade the theory of distributed leadership has moved from a tool to better understand the ecology of leadership to a widely prescribed practice. This article considers how to account for its spread and dominance and what purpose it serves.

This study investigates teacher empowerment in schools that have at least four years of experience with some form of decentralized or school-based management. 

Focusing on school leadership relations between principals and teachers, this study examines the potential of their active collaboration around instructional matters to enhance the quality of teaching and student performance

The goal of this study was to examine the relationship between four patterns of distributed leadership and a modified version of a variable Hoy et al. have labeled “teachers’ academic optimism.” The paper finds that high levels of academic optimism were positively and significantly associated with planned approaches to leadership distribution, and conversely, low levels of academic optimism were negatively and significantly associated with unplanned and unaligned approaches to leadership distribution.

The goal of the Massachusetts Educator Evaluation Framework is to support student learning by providing educators with enhanced opportunities for professional growth and feedback for improvement. Distributing leadership is a key strategy to ensure the provision of high quality feedback.

In a distributed leadership model, responsibilities for providing feedback and support to teachers are shared by the principal and other school and/or district staff. This feedback may be given by a wide variety of educators—from peers to coaches to administrators—and be used formatively for self-reflection, collaborative planning, and/or formally used in evaluation. Implementing a distributed leadership approach creates an opportunity for districts to ensure all educators are receiving high quality feedback to improve their practice.

In a distributed leadership model, responsibilities for providing feedback and support to teachers are shared by the principal and other school and/or district staff. This feedback may be given by a wide variety of educators—from peers to coaches to administrators—and be used formatively for self-reflection, collaborative planning, and/or formally used in evaluation. Implementing a distributed leadership approach creates an opportunity for districts to ensure all educators are receiving high quality feedback to improve their practice.

This book is designed to help the reader fully comprehend teacher leadership as a pathway to school improvement.

The purpose of this analysis is to describe the research base that undergirds the emerging concept of learning-centered leadership.

In this article, the authors examine leadership for effective learning employing research on highly productive schools and districts and high-performing principals and superintendents.

This book introduces the foundations of the recently revised professional educational leadership standards and provides an in-depth explanation and application of each one. 

In a high school in Greece, teachers assume all administrative roles, freeing up the principal to take school governance to the next level.

This report provides an overview of NYCLA’s flagship principal preparation program. Intended to help others involved in principal preparation think through important elements of principal preparation, including candidate selection, developing experiential learning opportunities, and funding, staffing and sustaining the program, the guide shares NYCLA’s successes and lessons learned during the 11 years we have delivered the Aspiring Principals Program in New York City, as well as through our work with various state and district partners nationally to adapt the program.

The purpose of this chapter was to trace the place of “social justice” in the field's discourse since the early 1960s, the decade in which the first academic journals of the field appeared. More specifically, the chapter aims at (1) presenting the emergence of “social justice” as an area of study in the field's journals from a historical perspective and (2) analyzing the major topics related to this area of study and its types of publication. 

This book aim is to advance understanding along many dimensions of the shared leadership phenomenon: its dynamics, moderators, appropriate settings, facilitating factors, contingencies, measurement, practice implications, and directions for the future. 

This study attempts to investigate the differential effectiveness of provocation, brainstorming, and emotional mastery at fostering the emotional intelligence of adolescents.

A review of school effectiveness literature is presented in this paper. Research studies and other literature on this topic are examined, including case studies, surveys and evaluations, studies of program:implementations, and organizational theories of schools and other institutions.

Drawing from video analysis of Distributed Leadership team meetings, this paper explores the work of the teams themselves, focusing on team priorities, organization, roles and authority dynamics, and decision making. The analysis focuses on the four Distributed Leadership schools that were in their second year of implementation in 2007-08.

Given the burgeoning interest in distributed leadership in education, it is timely to consider how research on this topic could make stronger and more rapid connections with student outcomes than has been evident in the history of the parent field of educational leadership (Harris, 2008). The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to develop an account of distributed leadership that is appropriate for research on this relationship.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relative impact of different types of leadership on students' academic and nonacademic outcomes.

Whether they are termed regional or assistant superintendents, area directors, instructional leadership supervisors, executive officers, or some other title, a leadership hierarchy is employed in school districts in the United States whereby principals report to and are managed or supported by principal supervisors. Traditionally, this role has primarily been one of representing the demands or expectations of the central office to the school by focusing on providing information about district initiatives and ensuring compliance.

This article sketches out a framework for inclusive leadership. As one of the constellation approaches to leadership and social justice, inclusive leadership is concerned first and foremost with inclusion, both in its processes and the ends for which it strives.

The bulk of the study is dedicated to an analysis of the empirical research literature on leadership effects. This includes the presentation of results from an earlier meta-analysis carried out by the authors, a summary of other meta-analyses, and a new meta-analysis based upon 25 studies carried out between 2005 and 2010.

In this report, the Southern Regional Education Board outlines critical actions that states, districts, universities and principals themselves should take as part of a systematic plan to address principal succession. The report makes the case for principal succession planning and describes six steps for succession planning that states and districts can implement to ensure they have the right principals for the job.

This report examines the evidence and analyses to substantiate the claim that leadership and principals in particular have a significant impact on students and schools.

This study examines the influence of principal leadership in high schools on classroom instruction and student achievement through key organizational factors, including professional capacity, parent–community ties, and the school’s learning climate.

The authors use principals’ self-ratings to construct typologies of effectiveness in both domains and compare their relationship to student achievement. Results show that principals view themselves as either strong or weak on instructional leadership and organizational management skills simultaneously. They also find that learning gains vary significantly across the principal profiles.

Stories of leadership successes follow a familiar structure: A charismatic leader, often the CEO or school principal, takes over a struggling school, establishing new goals and expectations and challenging business as usual within the organization. 

This 4-year longitudinal study, funded by the National Science Foundation and the Spencer Foundation, is designed to make the “black box” of leadership practice more transparent through an in-depth analysis of leadership practice. This research identifies the tasks, actors, actions, and interactions of school leadership as they unfold together in the daily life of schools. 

Building on activity theory and theories of distributed cognition, this paper develops a distributed perspective on school leadership as a frame for studying leadership practice, arguing that leadership practice is constituted in the interaction of school leaders, followers, and the situation.

Based on a synthesis of unpublished transformational school leadership (TSL) research completed during the last 14 years, this study inquired into the nature of TSL and its effects on student achievement using review methods including standard meta-analysis and vote-counting techniques. 

This report describes the Consortium for Policy Research in Education’s mixed-method evaluation of the Distributed Leadership (DL) project. The evaluation featured a cluster randomized control trial, where schools first agreed to participate in the study and then were chosen by lottery to participate in the DL project or serve in the comparison group. Overall there were 16 DL schools and 21 comparison sites in the evaluation.

This paper examines the effects of principal leadership and peer teacher influence on teachers' instructional practice and student learning.

A subgroup of principals—leaders for social justice—guide their schools to transform the culture, curriculum, pedagogical practices, atmosphere, and schoolwide priorities to benefit marginalized students. The purpose of the article is to develop a theory of this social justice educational leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the development of educational leadership, administration and management (EdLAM) research by identifying thematic strands that hallmark key publications and synthesise major research findings and limitations. 

This article provides a meta-analysis of research conducted on distributed leadership from 2002 to 2013. It continues the review of distributed leadership commissioned by the English National College for School Leadership (NCSL) which identified two gaps in the research during the 1996–2002 period.

Latent class analysis (LCA) was used to identify different types of principals across the U.S. The authors analyzed the 1999-2000 Schools and Staffing Survey as it presents a unique opportunity to study the different types of U.S. principals since it contains leadership measures not found in other national surveys or administrations. A final sample of 7,650 public schools and principals were included in the analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss findings from Learning from Leadership. This study was designed to identify and describe successful educational leadership and to explain how such leadership can yield improvements in student learning.

This report represents the first systematic comparison of student outcomes in schools led by the Aspiring Principals Program (APP) graduates after three years to those in comparable schools led by other new principals.

This quantitative meta-analysis examines impact of the principal's leadership on student achievement.

The article examines the tensions one superintendent in the USA experienced as he evaluated principals in a high-stakes environment that had undergone numerous transformations at the central office. Using qualitative methods, primarily, shadowing techniques, observations and debriefing, the following tensions emerged and were examined in light of the work of the superintendent evaluating principal performance.