LESSON 6 PRACTICE

DISTRIBUTED LEADERSHIP AND SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT: LEADING OR MISLEADING?

In practice 6 I worked very comfortably with my group since we prepared the practice the day before to organize ourselves better and to give us time.

This video explores AIR’s role in a leadership coaching program at an Illinois high school, which has seen considerable improvements in areas such as student attendance, graduation rates, and instruction delivery systems

1.- What is the objective of the research?

The objective of this research is to prove that distribution of leadership gives way to the improvement of the school with the use of empirical evidence. It wants to confirm that distributed leadership, which means to move leadership expertees to all levels of the school, can generate more opportunities for change and to build the capacity for improvement. In summary, if we are doing leadership by expertees rather than a leadership by role or years of experience, genuine distributed leadership will require high levels of trust and respect. Therefore, by assessing schools that have changed their way of being, we can prove our objective.

2.-What methodological tools have been used?

The main tools that we observed were the draws on several fields of enquiry, by looking at changes in organisation, the effectiveness of schools and their leadership. It also analyses in order the evidence from each area and gives us a combination of its most common findings.    In a more underlying perspective, we also found tools like the constant comparison between the different types of leadership, international research to see which models of leadership in schools maximize student learning and contribute to school improvement, a contemporary review of literature.

3.-What are the results obtained?

The results show that there really is a relationship between distributed leadership and organisational change. Furthermore, it highlights that there is reason to believe that this relationship may be of a benefit. Lastly, it proves that the different forms of distribution affect the final outcome of the organisation.

To understand the last result, we can use the NATH research: although heads of different stages in their career, different ages, different experiences and working in different situations, their approaches to leadership were very similar. With this research, they found that distributed leadership directly influenced approaches in problem-solving and decision-making of the schools.

The article concludes by the need for further research on the relationship between distributed leadership and school improvement and calls for studies exploring the impact of distributed forms of leadership on student learning outcomes.

4.-What conclusions are obtained in the study?

The conclusions that were obtained in the study were of a great quantity. To understand in a concrete way, we can study athemm and clearly see that the main conclusions that were obtained from the research were the following:

First of all, all the students must focus on their actions to improve academically and focus on the future professional activities. Second of all, the design of a reflective process to promote the action through cycles of change. Third of all, the development of a dynamic process to enable distributed leadership that goes beyond evaluation. Finally, the recognition of the hybrid nature of distributed leadership.

5- How could the conclusions obtained be applied in a school setting?

This conclusion can be applied in a way where we need to assess the outcome of the school now, followed by making the act of distributed learning easy for all schools in all situations to follow.

The ways we can improve said action for all school could be done by applying the following activities:

To improve the academic and professional actions of the students we could modify students study plan with the objective to succeed in their future by trying to focus on the things that they want to from a young age.

To promote the action through cycles of change students can try and increase their knowledge and capacity by working in groups which allows them to progress their professional mentality.

To increase the development of the leadership we could divide the class into groups. In each session one member of the group will have the chance to be the leader and that person must try to be better than the rest of the groups. Having this idea in mind, if we change the leader every time there is a different session we can put into action our last conclusion, the recognition of the hybrid nature of distributed leadership.

6.-What is your opinion on the research carried out?

From our point of view, distributed leadership reinforces the participation of all the members of the school community, promoting that every member of the school community feels part of the educational task. Our opinion  agrees with (Goleman, 2002) point of view, as he says distributed leadership is characterized as a form of collective leadership in which teachers develop expertise by working together.

Furthermore, we think that this form of leading benefits the interpersonal relations between students, parents and teachers, ensuring the quality of education. Moreover, if all the school community works together, the level of the quality of education will raise because they will all work in the same way and this will improve the knowledge and motivation of students.

Our thought coincides with (Spillane et al. , 2001) who says that distributed leadership gives a huge importance to collaboration and collegiality,  which ends up being  the core of distributed leadership .

As far as we are concerned, if schools really want to achieve this way of leading it is very important to include in the teachers schedule some hours where they can spend time working with other teachers to develop together the different activities that students will do and what they want to do with them.

This way of thinking is completely related with the way  Griffin (1995) and King et al. (1996) think, who talk about the importance of allocating time for teachers to work together and generate developmental activity of benefit to the school.

In conclusion, we can say that leaders who built self-esteem, enhanced, professional competence and gave their staff the confidence and responsibility to lead development and innovation will always be better leaders than those believe that it is only a misguided delegation.