Distributed Leadership In Education

689 Words2 Pages

In most leadership, stories, the central theme is that there is one vital leader who undertakes and effects the success of the organization. However, according to Spillane (2005), there is more to leadership than this; many people are involved behind the scenes and, it is more of a team leadership rather than a central leadership. Unlike instructional or transformational leadership, which focus on the characteristics and roles of the individual leader, distributive leadership focuses on how different players in the school setting conduct their distributed activities. As a result, it is important to point out that distributed leadership entails a division of work and specialization of labor. Each faculty or staff member is responsible for utilizing …show more content…

This list includes areas such as curriculum, assessment, behavior management, and instruction. It would be rare to find a single individual who has the capacity to master such a wide array of skills (Marzano et al., as cited in Vermont Department of Education, n.d.). Therefore, creating leadership teams can help successfully distribute the skills of individuals. In fact, most educational policy makers agree that substantial change cannot happen without the participation of other educators-mainly those already serving in the building (Pate, James & Leech, 2005). For this kind of leadership to be effective, a rather detailed structure needs to be adopted. Different faculty members strengths need to be noted and their assignments given based on their …show more content…

At times, with a view to having everyone involved in the leadership of the school, people are assigned similar roles under different titles. The direct result of this is a conflict of interest and leadership wrangles. Each individual will have their thought process for what needs to be undertaken and more often than not will conflict with what the other person wants. Ultimately, this leads to some form of a contest on whose ideas are better. Eventually, these leads to confusion in the school set up on what ay to follow. This is not only to the faculty but also to the students. Eventually, this leads to a collapse of the leadership style. As a result, it is important that when this form of leadership is enacted, a clear and well thought out plan needs to be undertaken. The duties and roles of the different individuals need to be spelt out in order to curb such cases of conflicts. More importantly, some argue that distributed leadership should be integrated with instructive leadership. An overall leader needs to assign the duties to each of the individuals for smooth running of the whole

Open Document