Distributed Leadership: Five Questions with Assistant Professor John Diamond

The new book, Distributed Leadership in Practice, edited by Assistant Professor John Diamond and Northwestern University Professor James P. Spillane, explores how a distributed perspective is different from other frameworks for thinking about leadership in schools. The book gives examples of how researchers and practitioners can understand and connect more directly to leadership practice, and how studying the day-to-day practice of leadership is important for those interested in improving schools. Diamond recently discussed how distributed leadership can impact teachers’ instruction and practice in schools.

Q: What are some of the leadership challenges facing schools today?

A: One of the biggest challenges facing schools is ensuring that all students, regardless of race, immigrant status, social class, etc. receive a high quality education and achieve to the best of their potential. This means making sure that students in every school and every classroom have high quality learning opportunities. To do this, school leaders need to create the conditions through which instructional practices are continually improved in order to meet all students’ needs.

Q: What is distributed leadership, and how does it differ from other leadership practices?

A: The distributed perspective is a conceptual framework for thinking about and studying school leadership and management. It is an analytic tool for studying leadership and a diagnostic tool for practitioners and those who seek to intervene inside schools. Much prior work focuses on what leaders who hold particular leadership positions do in general terms – they sell a vision of leadership, they monitor instruction, etc. The distributed perspective allows us to study and understand how leadership activity gets accomplished – the day-to-day practice of leadership.

The distributed perspective is not a type of leadership but a framework to understand all types of leadership and management. While prior school leadership research tends to emphasize the behaviors and traits of positional leaders such as principals, and to view organizational contexts and environments as a backdrop on which leadership practice unfolds, the distributed perspective emphasizes how leadership practice is constituted in the interactions among school leaders, followers, and their situations.

To date, our work using the distributed perspective has demonstrated the ways that leaders co-construct leadership activity, how leadership practice connects and fails to connect with instructional change, why teachers heed or ignore the guidance of school leaders, and how leadership is practiced differently in different school subjects (e.g. mathematics versus language arts). It also shows how leadership practices that appear disconnected actually relate to each in important ways. The distributed perspective brings coherence to leadership activity and helps ground our understanding of leadership practice in the daily activities that constitute it.

Q: How does a school administrator shift or redirect the leadership focus for an entire school?

A: Administrators can create the conditions for organizational change (e.g. establishing regular professional development opportunities) but our research, along with the work of many others, suggests that interactions with teaching colleagues in both formal and informal settings may be most important in shaping teachers’ instructional changes. Teachers typically turn to other teachers for instructional guidance and therefore administrators needs to recognize the limits of their direct influence on how teachers teach. So, administrators in our schools established regular meetings in which teachers discussed core instructional issues collaboratively, they repackaged testing data in ways that helped facilitate teachers’ conversations about instructional practice, they created internal assessment routines to monitor student progress and allow teachers to intervene to address emerging problems, they created subject matter teams that provide the context for teachers to solve instructional problems together.

Some administrators had a major direct influence. At Hillside school, discussed in chapter two of the book, the principal shaped how writing was taught by establishing a ‘writing folders’ routine in which she reviewed and commented on the writing assignments of over 1000 students a month. Teachers reported that this organizational routine shaped how they taught writing in ways that they perceived as productive. A critical thing that these practices had in common was that they focused on what the school and individual teachers could do differently to meet students’ needs.

Q: How does the practice of leadership raise teachers’ expectations and increase their sense of responsibility of student achievement?

A: Building teachers’ sense of responsibility for what students learn requires coordinated efforts of many school personnel. In Kelly School, which is discussed in the book, these characteristics were built through a set of interrelated organizational routines including close monitoring of each student’s academic progress, an explicit link between students’ outcomes and teachers’ practices, weekly 90-minute professional development meetings focused on instructional improvement, and the cultivation of a formal and informal discourse emphasizing high expectations, cultural responsiveness, and teachers’ responsibility for student learning.

Q: How can particular “routines” connected with leadership functions lead to student improvement?

A: Our work suggests ways that classroom instruction can be transformed, however, we have steered clear of focusing too heavily on students’ outcomes or questions of effectiveness. We argue that additional theory building and hypothesis generating work is needed before we begin to focus on effectiveness. Moreover, we argue that the critical issue in measuring effectiveness will ultimately be not that leadership is distributed but how it is distributed.

Our core focus has been on how leadership activity is accomplished and how it links to instructional change. It is this instructional change that we believe is crucial to students’ outcomes but we do not propose specific instructional strategies. The distributed perspective helps us understand how leadership practice links to instructional improvement, however organizations define the nature such improvement. School leaders may have very different instructional goals, but as a diagnostic tool, the distributed framework can help them reach these goals.