Research On Distributed Leadership In Middle School

Past research on school leadership focused specifically on individual function of the principal. It was suggested that the principals possess the characteristics and skills needed to remedy all the deficits of the schools in which they worked.With the development of educational reform, the society put forward higher expectations for building leaders.Numerous responsibilities, including managerial tasks, instructional monitoring, fiscal responsibilities, student issues, parental and community partnerships, and accountability to raise student achievement, have overwhelmed today’s school leaders. Therefore, leadership roles must extend beyond the principal ship to complete the complex tasks. The notion of the principal as the single,heroic leader has become obsolete. In order to deal with the complex internal and external school environment, it is necessary to shift away from traditional,hierarchical models of school leadership to those that support the practice of distributed leadership. Distributed leadership focuses on power distribution, share and collective cooperation. It advocates everyone can be a leader within the organization. This is not a simple increase in the thickness of leadership, but in specific circumstances, the leadership functions dispersed dynamically at all levels of the organization to develop all members’ leadership and maximize the effectiveness of organization,which is the inevitable trend of modern management. In order to improve the effectiveness of school leadership, This research is expected to have the certain reference value for the educational policy makers,the principals and the participation of school leadership preparation programs staff.This paper belongs to multiple cases research. It is based on the perspective of the distributed leadership theory and the distributed leadership theory framework for qualitative research and analysis. It observes distributed leadership practice behavior in three middle schools which fulfill the distributed leadership. Three schools were investigated on the basis of distribution of power, object and form of leadership function distribution etc, by analyzing a total of 70 teachers and three secondary school principals by questioning and 20 teachers and principals by interviewing.The main conclusions are as follows: leadership function distributed based on job responsibilities reflects the corresponding principle of duties and powers;leadership function distributed according to the nature of the task and the expertise of teachers makes leadership more scientific; most teachers agree with the distributed leadership practice;The dislocation of the principals’ responsibility, not enough decentralization or deficiency of authorization result in the un-ideal practical effect of distributed leadership. The implementation of distributed leadership eases the pressure of the principal, develops teachers’ leadership potential and improves the enthusiasm of teachers’ participation in schoolmanagement.However, while distributed leadership has made some achievements, there are also some practical problems as follows: The principal is not willing to share power; Some teachers do not take the initiative to assume the leadership role. Due to these factors there still exists a certain gap between the school distributed leadership practice and real distributed leadership. Aiming at some problems of distributed leadership in practice, the paper analyzes the causes. The reasons are: responsible for the alienation of the principal responsibility system restricts the effectively promotion of the distributed leadership; the old thoughts and the values of principals and teachers bring some negative effects to the distributed leadership; that the basic needs of the teachers are not met makes part of the teachers unwilling to assume the leadership role. Finally, the paper puts forward some practice strategies to improve the distributed leadership: Constructing the collaborative organization culture of leadership power sharing to create the atmosphere of distributed leadership;creating a "safe" environment of the leadership practice for teachers to enhance individual leadership; establishing incentive mechanism to improve the enthusiasm of teachers to participate in the leadership.