Distributed Instructional Leadership in High Schools

Any opinions, findings, or conclusions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies, WCER, or cooperating institutions. The authors acknowledges the research and editorial contributions of 2 This paper explores the idea of distributed instructional leadership as a way to understand instructional leadership practice in comprehensive high schools. Our argument is that distributed leadership analyses allow researchers to uncover and explain how instructional improvement in high schools occurs through the efforts of multiple individuals working to simultaneously influence the contexts of leadership and the contexts of instruction. The distributed instructional leadership model draws on the full potential of distributed leadership to describe not only who is involved with high school reforms, but also to describe the situated tools, tasks and routines required to change and maintain improved teaching. The first part of the paper develops an account of distributed instructional leadership as an approach to studying how leaders create high school learning environments by drawing upon research in distributed cognition. The second part of the paper provides an illustration of how the ideas of distributed instructional leadership were applied to the analysis of a curriculum-based reform in a comprehensive high school. Distributed instructional leadership applies the concepts and techniques of distributed leadership to study how school leaders create learning environments for teachers and students. The original distributed leadership framework (Spillane, Halverson practice is situated in local contexts, how it might be documented, and how it might be communicated to interested audiences. It draws on central concepts of distributed cognition to understand how leaders manage and change the complex cognitive systems of schools. The underlying distributed cognition concepts of tasks, tools, routines and cognitive systems play a central role in distributed leadership analysis. Distributed 3 leadership investigates the two dimensions of practice: the social distribution of leadership describes how tasks are shared, co-created or obstructed across multiple actors; the situational distribution describes how tools create (or thwart) opportunities to exercise effective leadership. In recent years, the attention of much distributed leadership research has focused on the social distribution of leadership practice. One goal of a social distribution of leadership practice study is to determine how many people share in leadership practices. Camburn, Rowan & Taylor (2003), for example, found that responsibility for school leadership functions was distributed among three to seven people, including teachers and formal leaders. How the …