Distributed leadership: developing theory from practice

Abstract Hopes that the transformation of schools lies with exceptional leaders have proved both unrealistic and unsustainable. The idea of leadership as distributed across multiple people and situations has proven to be a more useful framework for understanding the realities of schools and how they might be improved. However, empirical work on how leadership is distributed within more and less successful schools is rare. This paper presents key concepts related to distributed leadership and illustrates them with an empirical study in a school‐improvement context in which varying success was evident. Grounding the theory in this practice‐context led to the identification of some risks and benefits of distributing leadership and to a challenge of some key concepts presented in earlier theorizing about leadership and its distribution. Keywords: Distributed leadershipleadership effectivenessleadership qualitiesSchool improvementteacher leadership Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge the openness of the leaders in the schools involved in this research to having their practice scrutinized and their willingness to make changes in response to feedback. The funding support provided by the New Zealand Ministry of Education is also acknowledged. The helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript by James P. Spillane and Viviane Robinson were greatly appreciated. Notes Helen S. Timperley is co‐director of the Research Centre for Interventions in Teaching and Learning, Faculty of Education, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand; e‐mail: h.timperley@auckland.ac.nz. She has been involved in researching and evaluating the New Zealand Ministry of Education's initiatives to improve schooling for traditionally under‐achieving groups for a number of years. Her disciplinary background is organizational psychology, with a particular interest in promoting the learning of professionals within schools. 1 Includes suggested solutions. 1 Includes suggested solutions. * p < 0.05. 1. Reliability between the two coders of greater than 85% was obtained for all transcripts. Disagreements in coding were discussed and resolved to the satisfaction of both coders. 2. The coding categories were designed to be mutually exclusive and a single code assigned to whatever length of text was relevant to that code. Typically the unit of analysis was a sentence or paragraph. Sometimes the same code applied to several paragraphs. 3. Pseudonymns have been used for all schools. In the interests of clarity, Group one schools all begin with the letter 'B' and the Group two schools both begin with the letter 'A'. Additional informationNotes on contributorsHelen S. TimperleyFootnote Helen S. Timperley is co‐director of the Research Centre for Interventions in Teaching and Learning, Faculty of Education, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand; e‐mail: h.timperley@auckland.ac.nz. She has been involved in researching and evaluating the New Zealand Ministry of Education's initiatives to improve schooling for traditionally under‐achieving groups for a number of years. Her disciplinary background is organizational psychology, with a particular interest in promoting the learning of professionals within schools.