The promotion of distributed leadership competences of school leaders, teachers and students is a prerequisite for creating and strengthening the ethos of democracy and empowering progressive transformations in educational organisations. Improvisation as a drama therapy and learning method can support the development of distributed leadership as it enhances collaboration in decision making and problem solving, adaptability, responsibility, active listening, leading and, when needed, also giving space to others to lead processes and express themselves. The paper analyses the findings of research initiated and financed by the State Education Quality Service of the Republic of Latvia (Izglītības kvalitātes valsts dienests) in 2021 conducted with the participation of 75 school leaders. The research aimed to highlight distributed leadership gaps and verify whether improvisation as a drama learning method is feasible for overcoming them. Improvisation sessions organised in digital environment using YouTube and Zoom provided an opportunity for multi-faceted activities: teaching and learning different improvisation techniques; intra-group and intergroup communication and collaboration; data collection via observation in Zoom breakout rooms and reflection shared by the participants in electronic Google forms. For modelling school environment, random participants from each small group of three to five school leaders was appointed as its formal leader and the others – as followers. This revealed the participants’ stereotypic understanding of the role and responsibility scope of a leader and triggered appropriate behaviours. The qualitative content analysis resulted in four domains of categories linked to the characteristic elements of distributed leadership: power sharing, transforming dialogue, holistic learning, and relational well-being (Woods, 2020). The theoretical review encompasses questions on cultivating distributed leadership for enhancing substantial school effectiveness and sustaining improvement (Harris, 2014), including the analysis of the role of school leaders in achieving learning outcomes (Fullan & Quinn, 2016; Hattie & Zierer, 2018), linking them to the exploration of the potential of drama for developing personality, cognitive and affective learning, creativity, and leadership skills (Lahtero et al., 2017; Heyward, 2010). The conclusion made states that drama contributes to an individual’s or a group’s development through bringing in new dimensions of thinking, feeling, and behaving in real life situations, using different cultural forms and ways of expression to acquire a set of skills required for distributed leadership (Ozols, 2021). This study followed a similar research with school students as a target group in Latvia within Erasmus+ project ENABLES (Oganisjana et al., 2021).

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