School leadership: constitution and distribution

Abstract

Leadership is currently viewed as a guarantee for educational quality and reforms, as a crucial component for schools’ capacity building and as a major contributor to the transformation of practices. Although an array of leadership studies report on the need for leadership by demonstrating what leaders must do or how leadership practices should be configured for schools to be successful, less attention has been drawn to how leadership is played out and how it becomes consequential in social practices. In this article, the authors analyse leadership as an interactive process, in a leadership team in a Norwegian school that aims to develop assessment practices. Cultural historical activity theory frames this analysis. The analytic concepts’ perspective, position and interaction trajectory allow an investigation of leadership as an emergent property in the interactive process. Leadership emerges in complex chains of actions oriented by purposes constituted in the interplay of hierarchical and distributed dimensions of agency and authority.

Acknowledgements

This work is financially supported by the Department of Teacher Education and School Research and FALK research group for research on workplace learning in the knowledge society (http://www.uv.uio.no/forskning/grupper/falk/) at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Oslo.

We thank the Pinewood municipality and leadership team at Hill school who kindly allowed us to observe their activities. We also thank our colleagues at the Department of Teacher Education and Research, members of FALK and participants of the Norwegian Graduate School of Education Research (NATED) for their advice, support and constructive criticism. Finally thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive and valuable comments.

Notes

1. The group consists of the principals of each school and the municipal project coordinator. In addition, the ICT coordinators in each school participate when needed. An external facilitator from a university regularly supports the municipal group as well the schools leadership team when needed.

2. The Principal Hilda, the deputy head, Nick, the grade team leaders Harry and Dan and the ICT coordinator, Alex, Helen, an external facilitator in the project from a university was present at the meeting.

3. Hilda follows up by informing Helen about time available to collective development work: ‘one and a half hours on Wednesdays is reserved to team work at grad levels and one hour on Tuesdays to the schools’ joint development work in subject groups. After six hour teaching duty for many of the teachers those days we get started on creative thinking’.