This thesis focuses on how distributed leadership affects school leaders’ practices. Two questions are asked: 1. How does the architecture of practice affect school leadership in an effort to achieve distributed leadership? 2. What happens to school leadership practice when the architecture changes? The theoretical framework is based on practice theories which focuses on the context and askes: What happens here? In search of what surrounds the leadership practices, one looks for the arrangements which shape them. Together the arrangements make up an architecture which shapes the school leaders’ practice (Henning Loeb m.fl., 2019). The method used is action research (Reason & Bradbury, 2008), in particular the version called appreciative inquiry (Kadi-Hanifi, 2014). In their strife in doing the work better, a group of school leaders look towards a spreading of leadership activities and in building a strengthening of collective responsibility, which in short is what a distributed leadership means (Spillane, 2006). The material was analysed using practice theory and, using a five-step model (Yin, 2011), in combination with a thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The sum of the arrangements as they appeared in the time before the start of the project, locked the leadership up, where the feeling of being one step behind with a concern about tasks slipping and decisions made ad hoc marked the day. Since then, in alignment with changing arrangements, the school leaders’ practices have changed, making the school leaders better placed in spending more time preparing processes. Steps have been taken away from the details of the work which opens up for gaining a holistic view and being ahead. Most research on distributed leadership is based on explaining the positive consequences for students, while knowledge of how it changes school leaders' practice is much more limited. Although the knowledge that has been built in this study is placed in time, place and space and as such not easily generalized it is interesting to learn more about how school leaders' practices are affected by its context. School leaders, if they succeed in their work, have a major impact on how teachers thrive and, by extension, to what extent they are motivated to make an effort to do a good job, which in turn has a major impact on how students succeed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:ltu-85778 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Boork, Maria |
| Publisher | Luleå tekniska universitet, Institutionen för hälsa, lärande och teknik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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