Enactments of Distributed Pedagogical Leadership Between Early Childhood Centre Directors and Deputy Directors in Norway

This study aims to investigate how early childhood directors and deputy directors describe their enactments of distributed pedagogical leadership. An interpretive qualitative study was conducted by way of semi-structured individual interviews and job-descriptions of six participants. Distributed leadership frameworks that involve multiple persons enacting pedagogical leadership in interdependent ways, inform the study. The findings of this study illustrate that enactments of distributed pedagogical leadership between ECE directors and deputy directors occur both by leading together where they enact the same leadership task and where they work separately with tasks they have divided between them. Additionally, shared authority, dialogue on pedagogical development, support and division of tasks show various forms of distributed pedagogical leadership enactments. The study highlights some implications for further attention to take benefit from distributed pedagogical leadership. This is important as distributive leadership is seen to increase the capacity of pedagogical leadership through collaboration to deal with challenges and high workload resulting from new requirements and changes.