The Distribution of Leadership

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1 Introduction The distribution of leadership has been practiced from ancient times, Hatschepsut co-ruled Egypt with Thutmose III and the history of Rome is peppered with examples of joint-Emperorships. These examples, which involve sharing or complimentary leadership, are salient because they involve the tips of massive hierarchical organisations and show that there has been a need to flatten hierarchies and share responsibilities from ancient times. The current term used is distributed leadership and its application is not exclusive to educational organisations. Although shared leadership is often taken to refer to POWER. Within the last 10 years there has been a shift of emphasis of attention by educational scholars to the role of leadership in schools, notably by Peter Gronn. This has included examining what is meant by leadership as well as how it is shared and devolved. This assignment sets out a plan for a small-scale study to investigate the perceptions of administrators and teachers at Danube International School Vienna to the effectiveness of implementation and functioning of a co-principalship of four administrations/leaders where there had previously only been a single principal. I aim to do this by defining the terms used in this assignment, placing the study in context, reviewing the literature to address the scope and focus of this specific study, design the research with a focussed research question and investigative strategy, define the timetable, methods for the collection and analysis of data through to a discussion of the reliability and validity of the method, collection, analysis, ethical considerations and finally the significance of the study. 2 Context Danube International School Vienna has approxi... ... middle of paper ... ...rch projects has mainly focussed on (compare types of co-principalship) and almost exclusively where there have been only two co-principals. This study looks at a larger extent … blah. This essentially leaves the study as a snapshot with little scope as a longditudinal study. However, the Director is committed to the principles of distributed leadership and it may be very interesting to harvest more views in the long-term to make a comparison if similar changes happen again in a few years. Each time making comparisons. Works Cited Court, Marian (2003) 'Towards democratic leadership. Co-principal initiatives', International Journal of Leadership in Education, 6: 2, 161 — 183 West , Edwin L., Jr (1978) ‘The Co-Principalship: Administrative Realism’ The High School Journal, Vol. 61, No. 5 (Feb., 1978), pp. 241-246 Published by: University of North Carolina Press

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