The article is based on a follow-up study of a research and development (R&D) work project conducted in a Norwegian lower secondary school. The teachers involved in the project worked at a school that emphasised school development with the students’ learning as the main focus. The headmistress eagerly welcomed researchers into her school to help her develop practice and the premises necessary for improving it. In the study I wanted to find out how the project intentions were kept alive about two years later. The text presents an understanding of what the practitioners find they have learned during the project and how they experience the situation with regard to development about two years after the project has ended. The article deals with what the teachers have learned individually when it comes to how they plan, accomplish and reflect on their own teaching, and how they perceive working collectively together with other teachers to learn.

The findings are presented and analysed within the frame of related research and the theory of distributed leadership. Elmore (2000) maintains that distributed leadership guides and directs instructional improvement, where leadership is seen as activity and interaction (Gronn, 2002; Spillane, Halverson & Diamond, 2004). Elmore (2000) also maintains that leadership should be based on effort, skill and knowledge, and not on personal characteristics. This means that leadership can be learned. Instructional leadership is more focused than most conceptions of leadership in education, and according to Elmore, leadership should be instrumental to improvement, meaning that the skills and knowledge that matter in leadership are those that are directly connected to the improvement of instruction and student performance. Leaders require knowledge to guide and direct improvement, but guidance and direction can have multiple sources, and thus be distributed to others in the organisation with suitable competence. In a school, the headmistress and some teachers are better at doing some things than others, and here distributed leadership means to organise these competences into a coherent whole to meet the various tasks in the organisation. People can complement each other, and one person’s competence can be shared with others. Moreover, when organising competences, it is also necessary to understand when the competence in the organisation is not equal to the problem that is to be solved and there is a need to search for competence outside the school. In their role as administrators, leaders shall enhance the skills and knowledge of people in the organisation to create a common culture of expectations, to hold the various pieces of the organisation together in a productive relationship and to hold individuals accountable for their contributions to a collective result (Elmore, 2000). Seeking and giving advice to colleagues so they can learn new skills is gauged as a professional action in a culture emphasising distributed learning. The new skills to be learned should also be connected to common goals within a school that give direction for learning (Rosenholtz, 1986; Senge, 2006).

Elmore, R.F. (2000). Building a new structure for school leadership. American Educator, 23(4), 1–9. Gronn, P. (2002). Distributed leadership. In K. Leithwood & P. Hallingar (eds.), Second International Handbook of Educational Leadership and Administration (p. 653-696). Dordrect: Kluwer Academic Printers. Moustakas, C. (1994). Phenomenological Research Methods. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Rosenholtz, S. (1986). Organizational Conditions of Teacher Learning. Teaching and Teacher Education, 2(2), 91-104. Senge, P.M. (2006). The Fifth Discipline. The Art & Practice of the Learning Organisation. New York: Currency Doubleday.Spillane, J.P., Halverson, R., & Diamond, J.B. (2004). Towards a theory of leadership practice: a distributed perspective. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 36(1), 3-34.