Towards a new contract? Understanding school leadership in a distributed perspective

Abstract

The thesis provides a detailed analysis of the distribution of leadership in one school; as well, it attempts to place the findings at one school in the larger context of Norwegian education. The thesis is descriptive and asks the question: How is leadership connected to instructional quality distributed in one upper secondary school in Norway? To answer this question, empirical data were gathered through qualitative interviews with teachers and school leaders, and then analyzed in relation to three discrete elements: 1) four patterns of the distribution of leadership, which categorize leadership along two axes as spontaneous or planful, as aligned or misaligned. 2) three dimensions that leadership is situated in and/or can be understood through, the regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive 3) three axes along which leadership is performed: the student-teacher axis, the teacher leader-teacher follower axis and the leader-teacher axis The findings indicate the apparent need for a new term, low-grade alignment, and the thesis suggests that the distribution of leadership at the school in question can as a whole best be described as spontaneous low-grade alignment. However, patterns of distribution do vary some depending upon which of the three axes is observed, suggesting that it may be more useful to describe leadership distribution along the various axes than for the school as a whole. The findings also indicate that leadership in the school was most strongly situated in the normative dimension. As well, they revealed that analyzing leadership in the school through each dimension provided relevant and useful insights into leadership distribution in the school, among them potentially changing leadership roles of teachers vis á vis students, their colleagues and school leaders.