Session Information
26 SES 09 A, Same Name, Different Meanings And Practices? Distributed Leadership Across Cultures And Methods
Symposium
Contribution
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused “undeniable chaos” (Hargreaves and Fullan 2020, 334) in schools. While distributed leadership (DL) was regarded as the most commonly implemented educational leadership model prior to the Covid-19 crisis, its importance has been re-established during the pandemic as it is said to have become the default leadership style through necessity (Harris and Jones 2020). There has been a slow movement towards shared leadership practices in Ireland since the early 2000’s. Similar to many other countries, DL is endorsed in Irish post-primary school policy (Barrett 2018). Due to its current endorsement and the reported necessity of DL during the Covid-19 pandemic, a distinct need to research post-primary school personnel’s interpretations and perceptions of DL implementation was identified. The aims of this study were therefore, to explore Irish post-primary school personnel’s interpretations of DL, and to investigate the perceived prevalence of DL in Irish post-primary schools. To achieve the study focus, a two-part online questionnaire was shared with school teachers, leaders, guidance counsellors and special needs assistants currently working in Irish post-primary schools. This survey comprised an adapted version of the Distributed Leadership Inventory (Hulpia, Devos, and Rosseel 2009) comprising 21 Likert-type statements, as well as a series of open ended questions. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse the Likert-type statements while thematic analysis was used for the open-ended questions. The results of this study suggest that while there are some similarities in participants’ interpretations of DL, there are also divergences relating to who participants believe is involved in distributed practices, what exactly is shared, and how it is shared. Data analysis suggests that participants’ roles in their school, their school type, and number of years experience could be influencing their interpretations of DL. Analysis of data pertaining to the perceived prevalence of DL in Irish post-primary schools resulted in varied degrees of perceived implementation. The importance of school culture, the division of labour, and working relationships were interpreted as core factors influencing DL’s perceived implementation. The Covid-19 pandemic was reported to exacerbate the distribution of leadership practices or lack-thereof depending on the context. This study adds to the emerging body of literature on DL with potential to inform future school policy and practice. Suggestions to further conceptualise the division of labour, and school culture required for a distributed practice are presented as well as the importance of building positive relationships and a need to avoid “tick-the-box” DL.
References
Barrett, Alphie. 2018. "Leadership and Management in Post-pimary Schools." In, edited by Department of Education and Skills, 1-30. Hargreaves, Andy, and Michael Fullan. 2020. "Professional capital after the pandemic: Revisiting and revising classic understandings of teachers' work." Journal of Professional Capital and Community. Harris, Alma, and Michelle Jones. 2020. "COVID 19–school leadership in disruptive times." School Leadership & Management 40 (4):243-7. Hulpia, Hester, Geert Devos, and Yves Rosseel. 2009. "Development and validation of scores on the distributed leadership inventory." Educational and Psychological Measurement 69 (6):1013-34.
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