The networked leader: understanding peer influence in a system wide leadership team

ABSTRACT

This work attempts to examine instructional leadership from a peer influence perspective within a districtwide network of educational leaders. This approach to instructional leadership supplements a conventional understanding of technical core of professional collaboration. We argue from a social network perspective that individual perception is likely to be influenced by the perception of peers with whom one has direct connections. Specifically, this study investigates individual leaders’ perception of instructional leadership and its relationships with the perceptions of peers as they collaborate with one another among a districtwide leadership team in one large school district implementing large scale school reforms in California. Findings suggest that organisational learning and personal beliefs perceived by peer collaborators are associated with individual leaders’ perception of instructional leadership.

KEYWORDS:

• Common Core State Standards
• social network
• beliefs
• instructional leadership
• organisational learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Yi-Hwa Liou http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8821-7113

Notes

1 The role of an ‘alter’ in contrast to ‘ego’ comes from the concept of ego network. An ego network consists of a focal node (i.e., ego) and the nodes with whom the ego is directly connected (those nodes are called alters).