The hierarchical nature of different institutional arrangements, especially those that are entrenched in the Indian context, has, historically and to some extent, suppressed the agency of teachers, hampered innovation, and reduced their responsiveness to the changing needs of modern education. The centralisation of authorities, which is based on these top-down structures with roots in colonial bureaucratic legacies, limits the power to make professional decisions and empower teachers. It presents a perspective on the future of teacher leadership, as conceptualised by the authors as an informal, expertise-based influence that is not confined to the classroom setting, but redefines leadership as a distributed, place-based praxis. This reconceptualization aims at reducing rigorous hierarchies through the prism of distributed management principles. Based on the development of distributed leadership as an emergent phenomenon by Spillane and others, which is built upon the interactions between actors, contexts, and artefacts, the paper will incorporate teacher-leadership conceptions that forecast empowerment, the development of professional communities, and influence within the school system. Theoretical underpinnings based on organisational learning, social constructivism, analysis of managerialism, and ideas of relational power support the suggestion that the hierarchies can be redesigned into horizontal, networked interdependencies. The Consistent model proposed is the Distributed Teacher Leadership Model (DTLM) that aligns the mobilisation of instructional leaders into distributed systems and the decentralisation of hierarchical structures and processes of interdependence and redistribution of authority and development of adaptability, agency, and collective efficacy.
Samal et al. (Mon,) studied this question.
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