ERIC Number: EJ1111686
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2013-Jul
Pages: 37
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: EISSN-2014-9018
EISSN: N/A
Making Sense of Distributed Leadership: How Secondary School Educators Look at Job Redesign
Louis, Karen Seashore; Mayrowetz, David; Murphy, Joseph; Smylie, Mark
International Journal of Educational Leadership and Management, v1 n1 p33-68 Jul 2013
This paper examines how teachers and administrators who were involved in a multi-year effort to engage in distributed leadership interpreted their experiences. We lay out and apply an argument for using an interpretive perspective to study distributed leadership. Collective sensemaking around distributed leadership is illustrated by an in-depth analysis of a single high school. The school was part of a larger study of six schools, and was selected to illustrate sensemaking over time in a large, complex school. There were three years of on-site interviews, observations and document analysis. We found that distributed leadership is a potential "disruption" to traditional patterns of leadership, work performance and influence in high schools. One-quarter of the school's faculty engaged with the "disruption" but all had a chance to process the change. The end result was that many became sense-givers and kept the momentum for teacher leadership going during significant personnel turnover among faculty and administration. The success of the efforts to create more broadly distributed leadership was facilitated by its integration into an existing improvement initiative.
Descriptors: Leadership Styles, Secondary School Teachers, Teacher Attitudes, Job Enrichment, Case Studies, Interviews, Observation, Content Analysis, Comprehension, Learning Processes, Cooperative Learning, Vocational High Schools, Educational Change, Communities of Practice, Teacher Leadership
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Secondary Education; High Schools
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A