Leadership Distribution in Action

Today, educational leaders are asked to be responsible for instruction, finances, staffing, and teacher learning while complying with Federal, State, and local accountabilities. A distributive leadership framework helps making sense of this new leadership configuration. Nevertheless, many distributed leadership studies assumed that leaders share consensus around goals, overlooking micropolitical processes of schools. Moreover, it has been difficult for researchers to establish how leadership that is distributed influences teaching and learning. Using a "multi-sited ethnography", this book links the micro-decisions that teachers make in the classroom with different patterns of leadership distribution. The book shows that school leaders have multiple agendas and visions, sometimes competing among each other. Introducing the category of "leadership alignment", this work presents three different patterns of leadership distribution: Fragmented, Parallel and Complementary. The analysis will contribute to shed some light on how different patterns of leadership distribution influence teaching and learning. The book should be useful to school administrators, school leaders, and researchers.