Department networks and distributed leadership in schools

This article was downloaded by: [Universitat Politècnica de València]On: 17 October 2014, At: 01:44Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

School Leadership & Management:Formerly School OrganisationPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cslm20

Department networks and distributedleadership in schoolsJorge Ávila de Lima aa University of Azores , PortugalPublished online: 17 Apr 2008.

To cite this article: Jorge Ávila de Lima (2008) Department networks and distributed leadershipin schools, School Leadership & Management: Formerly School Organisation, 28:2, 159-187, DOI:10.1080/13632430801969864

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13632430801969864

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cslm20

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/13632430801969864

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13632430801969864

http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Department networks and distributed

leadership in schools

Jorge Avila de Lima*University of Azores, Portugal

Many schools are organised into departments which function as contexts that frame teachers’

professional experiences in important ways. Some educational systems have adopted distributed

forms of leadership within schools that rely strongly on the departmental structure and on the role

of the department coordinator as teacher leader. This paper reports a study of department

networks and distributed leadership in two schools. The study collected two types of data on

teacher networks in the schools: attributions of the influence of colleagues on one another’s

professional development and joint professional practice. Measures included actor centrality and

network density. The study identified distinct leadership configurations in different departments.

The implications for the study of distributed leadership and for the distribution of leadership roles

in educational organisations are discussed.

Keywords: social networks; distributed leadership; department heads

Introduction

Many teachers’ professional experiences are framed in important ways by the

departments in which they work in their schools. These organisational units often

serve as critical points of reference for teacher identity, interaction and professional

development (Siskin 1994; Siskin and Little 1995). Teacher learning and develop-

ment can be promoted or inhibited by the particular cultures of these organisational

units (McLaughlin and Talbert 2001).

Leadership is a key aspect of departmental culture. Department leaders may

function as critical interpreters of state-imposed reform legislation for their

colleagues (Ball and Bowe 1992). They may help create vital climates for change

in their departments and propagate a clear and shared sense of vision among their

colleagues, namely by stimulating ‘a constant interchange of professional informa-

tion at both a formal and an informal level’, and by acting as ‘lead professionals’ that

use their own mode of practice as a model to follow in teaching (Harris et al. 1995,

287). Department heads can also play a critical role in enabling their departments to

become more effective in the promotion of student achievement (Sammons et al.

1997) and they may perform an important mentoring or supervisory leadership role

* Email: [email protected]

ISSN 1363-2434 (print)/ISSN 1364-2626 (online)/08/020159-29

# 2008 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13632430801969864

School Leadership and Management,

Vol. 28, No. 2, April 2008, pp. 159�187

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

in supporting the professional development of their colleagues (Glover et al. 1999).

Finally, these leaders may develop a leadership style that strongly shapes the

direction and cohesiveness of their department (Busher and Harris 1999) �/ in short,

they may have a significant influence on the quality of teaching and learning within

the curriculum areas under their responsibility (Harris 2000).

There has been growing recognition that the role of heads of department is of

major importance for a school’s effectiveness and improvement (Busher and Harris,

1999). Some authors even hold that ‘the leadership of the head of department is the

key to developing successful schools’ and that ‘it is the head of department who

should be the focus for supporting the classroom teachers who actually have the

frontline responsibility for the enhancement of teaching, learning and achievement in

classrooms’ (Brown et al. 2000, 239). This widespread belief in the department

head’s potential for educational change may be overstated, but it clearly illustrates

the prominence that is given to the role in current writing on educational

organisations and educational change.

This paper looks at the roles of department coordinators and other teacher leaders

within a system of formally distributed teacher leadership in 12 departments of two

Portuguese schools. It starts by presenting and discussing the distributed perspective

on leadership in organisations, and illustrates how this is connected to calls for more

teacher leadership in schools. It then focuses specifically on the role of the head of

department and discusses its potential for professional leadership. Subsequently, the

paper makes a case for a network approach to the study of distributed leadership in

schools and departments. This is followed by the presentation of an empirical study

that utilised this approach. The paper closes with a discussion of the implications of

the study for research on and distribution of leadership roles in educational

organisations.

The distributed perspective on leadership in schools

In recent years, the idea of leadership has enjoyed a truly ‘iconic status’ in the

educational literature (Storey 2004, 251). A variety of forms of leadership have

emerged as an alternative to the more traditional hierarchical model of school

organisation. From the 1980s onwards, especially, school leadership research

abandoned its traditional focus on strong principal leadership. Leadership ceased

to focus almost exclusively on the actions of strong leaders with exceptional powers

and vision �/ the ‘heroic leaders’ referred to by Yukl (1999) �/ and gradually began to

be described in terms of ‘activities and interactions that are distributed across

multiple people and situations’ (Timperley 2005, 395). Current discourses on school

improvement downplay the traditional notion of the single strong leader and

emphasise the collective responsibility and collegial activity of wider groups of

teachers (Frost and Harris 2003). The main innovation of these alternative

conceptions is the introduction of the notion of ‘distributed leadership’ �/ a

conception of leadership as enacted in multiple roles and multiple role incumbents.

160 J.A. de Lima

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

Definitions of distributed leadership vary widely. Some equate it with the creation

of highly participative and flexible ‘bossless teams’ in work settings where differences

in formal authority between actors either do not exist, or are intentionally down-

played (Barry 1991). Other efforts to redefine leadership attempt to locate it in the

processes that occur among actors, rather than on any particular actor. For example,

Spillane et al. (2001) argue that ‘by taking leadership practice in a school as the unit

of analysis, rather than an individual leader, [a] distributed theory of leadership

focuses on how leadership practice is distributed among both positional and informal

leaders’ (24). Similarly, Gronn (2003a) grounds his conception of distributed

leadership in an analysis of the actual division of labour in the workplace. As Spillane

(2006) warns, ‘moving beyond the principal or head teacher to include other

potential leaders [what the author calls a ‘‘leader-plus’’ approach] is just the tip of the

iceberg, from a distributed perspective’ (p. 3).

In Spillane’s (2006) conception of leadership practice, a distributed view implies

focusing on actors’ (both leaders’ and followers’) webs of relations, as well as on their

‘situations’, conceived as complex sets of work routines, tools, structures and

elements of organisational culture. As the author stresses, situations are not simply

contexts within which leadership occurs; they are defining elements of leadership

practice (Spillane 2006, 22, 74�/83). While the present paper acknowledges this view

of leadership practice and discusses data on particular aspects of the web of teachers’

work interactions, it does not present qualitative evidence on the full spectrum of

leadership situations. It can thus be taken as lying somewhere between a leader-plus

perspective and a more comprehensive perspective that focuses on leadership

practice, defined in Spillane’s terms.

In this paper, distributed professional teacher leadership is conceived as a process

whereby teachers, individually or collectively, influence their colleagues in order to

improve their professional practice (York-Barr and Duke 2004, 287�/288), either in

the classroom or outside it. Influence over colleagues is thus regarded as a key

component of leadership practice. Therefore, teachers’ perceptions of being

influenced by colleagues in professional matters are taken as indicators of the

presence of leadership processes. The more dispersed these perceptions are within a

network of teachers, the more distributed leadership is. However, as I will show

below, we also need to identify distributed leadership patterns beyond teachers’

perceptions of the phenomenon.

Several researchers and commentators suggest that a widely distributed and

redundant pattern of leadership within a school promotes successful instructional

improvement (Camburn et al. 2003; Day and Harris 2002; Wallace 2002). Some

even adopt a normative position towards this form of leadership and argue that the

more it is distributed among teachers and the less it is contained within formally

specified roles, the better. These views are seldom based on solid research evidence,

but rather on mere belief in the virtues of the distributed model.

An increasing number of researchers, teacher trainers, policy-makers and

administrators who call for new forms of leadership in education stress the notion

of ‘teacher leadership’. Most of the forms of teacher leadership that are proposed are

School Leadership and Management 161

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

grounded, either implicitly or explicitly, on a conception of distributed leadership

(Harris 2003). In fact, distributing leadership in schools implies involving more

teachers in leadership functions and roles than has traditionally been the case. One

form of teacher leadership that has received considerable attention in the literature is

instructional leadership (Glickman et al. 2001; Blase and Blase 2004). This is often

defined as teacher leaders’ ability to involve their colleagues collaboratively in mutual

learning and development, with the main purpose of improving teaching and

learning. Discussions of the roles of subject leaders and heads of department often

emphasise this ‘leading professional’ dimension (Bennett 1995; Aubrey-Hopkins and

James 2002).

The concept of instructional leadership was developed during the effective schools

movement of the 1980s (Burlingame 1987). However, the term ‘instruction’ (which

is used by many North American authors as a synonym for teaching or pedagogy) may

convey a restrictive interpretation of pedagogical work; it can be interpreted as

narrowing it down to only one part of the teaching and learning process (MacNeill

et al. 2003), and therefore exclude other key aspects of teachers’ professional lives,

such as staff development, curriculum development, the planning and assessment of

learning, and educational and institutional evaluation, among other relevant aspects

of teachers’ professional lives. Also, in the effective schools literature, the term

instructional leadership has often tended to be identified with ‘strong, directive

leadership focused on curriculum and instruction from the principal’ (Hallinger

2003). While this conventional version of the instructional leadership concept

focuses on the role of the principal/headteacher as the centre of expertise and

authority in a school, a distributed conception of professional leadership in teaching

implies a focus on teachers as leaders. Within this framework, an important task for

researchers is to determine whether or not (and to what extent) teachers develop

leadership practices that relate to crucial dimensions of their colleagues’ professional

lives, including classroom practice, but extending beyond it.

It is reasonable to assume that teachers who act as professional leaders are active in

respect of the technical core of their colleagues’ work: that they learn with and help

them learn together in collaborative communities of practice. A key distinguishing

feature of this professional conception of leadership is that leaders strongly invest in

building relationships among staff and in developing the capacity for learning within

their schools, not only among pupils, but also among their colleagues (Sergiovanni

1998; Webb 2005). In short, professional leadership places a strong emphasis on

schools becoming professional learning organisations and does not assume that top

leaders alone will provide the leadership that creates the conditions for teacher

learning and development; leadership is regarded mainly as an organisational quality

(Ogawa and Bossert 1995), a pattern that cuts across an entire school. Moreover, in

this paper, instructional leadership is understood as a component or dimension of

professional leadership, with the latter being taken as a broader concept which

embraces dimensions of professional life that extend beyond the classroom level.

There are several possible interpretations of how to actually distribute leadership

among teachers (Frost and Harris 2003). For some, what is at stake is the need to

162 J.A. de Lima

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

select certain teachers to undertake designated leadership roles (Katzenmeyer and

Moller 1996). An example would be to appoint experienced teachers (e.g. ‘lead

teachers’, ‘master teachers’, ‘teaching and learning consultants’) to posts designed

for the purpose of improving their colleagues’ performance. Often, these teachers

intervene as outside agents contracted by districts to improve the performance of

some schools. At other times, they act as inside agents who are designated to roles

such as mentors, action-research facilitators, in-service training coordinators, or

coordinators of special education programmes within the school.

A second version is based on the expectation that teachers who already occupy

some formal positions (for example, middle management roles, such as department

headships, or subject area coordination roles) should be the ones who exercise this

kind of leadership. Calls for the development of these teachers are sometimes

grounded on research results that underline the contribution which middle managers

can make to school improvement (Busher et al. 2001).

A third and final interpretation holds that leadership will be exercised by teachers,

regardless of their formal position or official designation for a given role. The

distinctiveness of this latter approach lies in its underlying, albeit controversial, belief

that potentially all teachers have the capacity to engage in leadership activity in their

school. Clearly, not all teachers can or will be professional leaders in their schools.

However, it is clearly possible that several of them can act as professional leaders

besides (and even in spite of) formally appointed colleagues. In short, while the

notion that all teachers can (and need to) be leaders is certainly questionable, this

interpretation builds on the important idea that studies of leadership in schools

should not focus only on principals and formal leaders (Ogawa and Bossert 1995).

This is consistent with fruitful suggestions (for example, those made by Gronn 2000,

commenting on Gibbs’s work) that observers of leadership need to avoid making a

priori assumptions with regard to the distribution of leadership functions among

group members; they should concentrate on leadership practices, rather than on

official leader designations.

The role of the head of department as professional leader

As mentioned above, one way to approach the study of distributed leadership in

schools is to focus on perceptions and practices associated with formally designated

leadership positions, such as curriculum area coordinators. Schools implementing

these kinds of leadership structures provide fruitful territory for the study of

distributed leadership. As Little (1995) notes, the position of department head is the

most common form of teacher leadership at the school level. It is, therefore, in most

systems, the most immediately available and visible case for judging the possibilities

for distributed teacher leadership in educational organisations.

In Portugal, the introduction of the departmental structure and the creation of

‘curriculum department coordinator’ positions in the late 1990s reconfigured the

formal structure of leadership positions within schools, by formally instituting a


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

distributed leadership model that invested the incumbents of these new roles with

wide-ranging professional leadership functions. Subject departments were formally

introduced in 1998. According to this legislation, the curriculum department

coordinator must fulfil several important professional functions. Among many

others, he or she must:

. ensure curriculum integration through the promotion of cooperation among

department members and between the department and other organisational units

of the school;

. ensure the coordination of department members’ pedagogy and student assess-

ment practices;

. identify department members’ training needs and promote their adequate school-

based in-service training.

This legislation places a complex set of responsibilities on the department

coordinator. The demand for a deep and broad level of professional leadership is

stated explicitly, and the pedagogical areas where it is to be exercised are detailed.

The new structure does not assume that the coordinator is or should be the primary

source of professional knowledge in the department, or that he or she should impose

a top-down approach to leadership; rather, in a more collegial tone, it calls for his or

her action as a key facilitator of teacher interaction and growth. In other words, the

department formal leader is not conceived as an expert or as a hierarchical superior,

but rather as a coordinator of professionals and a facilitator of colleagues’

professional learning and development.

The extent to which heads of department or department coordinators actually

exercise strong professional leadership in their schools and departments is unclear.

To date, no research on this specific matter has been conducted in Portuguese

schools. Research in the USA has shown that the role of the department head is

constructed differently in different schools and in different departments (Little

1995): in some, serving this function is regarded as merely taking one’s turn in the

rotation of the function among colleagues; in others, the department head is granted

considerable power and exerts substantial influence in the shaping of a professional

community among the staff under her/his responsibility. In the former cases,

department heads fulfil mainly an administrative role; in the latter ones, they are

strong curriculum and instructional leaders. In general, the research literature points

to a scarcity of teacher leadership targeted directly at teaching and learning (Little

2003). Recent research conducted in Britain (Turner 2003) also suggests that, on the

whole, heads of department have not assumed clear responsibility for the profes-

sional development of their departmental colleagues.

One way to clarify whether formal department leaders actually exercise profes-

sional leadership by stimulating the professional growth of their colleagues and

helping create and nurture collegial cultures in their departments is to study teachers’

views of the impact of these formal leaders on their professional development. A

complementary approach is to examine department coordinators’ actual patterns of

164 J.A. de Lima

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

interaction with their colleagues, and the networks of professional ties within their

departments. Both approaches entail looking at teacher leadership as a process of

social influence that can be studied within the framework of a social network analysis

research design.

A social network approach to distributed leadership in schools

Teacher leadership is, above all, a process of interpersonal influence among

colleagues. This influence component is explicitly articulated in several prominent

definitions of teacher leadership. For example, Wasley (1991) defines this form of

leadership as ‘the ability to encourage colleagues to change, to do things they

wouldn’t ordinarily consider without the influence of the leader’ (23). In the same

vein, Katzenmeyer and Moller (1996) hold that teachers who are leaders ‘influence

others towards improved educational practice’ (17). Similarly, Harris (2003) argues

that teacher leaders ‘work with colleagues to shape school improvement efforts and

take some lead in guiding teachers towards a collective goal’ (316). Harris and Muijs

(2002) also underline that the possibility of teacher leadership in a school is

dependent on ‘the extent to which teachers accept the influence of colleagues who

have been designated in a particular area’ (4). In short, teachers become leaders

when they influence their colleagues’ professional development and practice and

when they are regarded by these colleagues as influential and are allowed to lead by

them.

In this paper, leadership is understood as activities that actors in a social system

design to influence other actors in that system, as well as activities that actors

understand as influencing them (see Spillane 2006, 11�/12). This definition is similar

to Gronn’s (2003a), who referred to leadership as ‘a lay label of convenience

encompassing emergent actions (verbal, physical, reputed or imagined) that

influence the deeds and thoughts of colleagues’ (6). Such understanding acknowl-

edges that ‘people can perceive activities as leadership even if they are not influenced

by the activities’ (Spillane 2006, 11). It also recognises that individuals can be

influenced by activities that exist only in their imagination (Gronn 2003a). However,

in this paper, I focus exclusively on actors’ recognitions of the influence of others upon

them, as well as on the interactions they maintain with those others.

Gronn (2003a) has argued that ‘the basis of leadership is cognitive and grounded

in the mental attributions of workplace peers’ (6). The author’s assertion that, if

leadership is understood as attributed influence, then ‘leadership is in the eye of the

beholder’ (Gronn 2003b, 274), calls for an attribution approach to the study of

teacher distributed leadership. In terms of attribution theory, a person is a leader

because others say so (McElroy 1982). The main strength of such an approach is that

it broadens the scope of leadership research by focusing greater attention on the

social context of leader activity (McElroy and Shrader 1986). However, despite this

advantage, it also has an important weakness. Indeed, as Spillane (2006, 5) warns,

‘leadership can occur without evidence of its outcome’�/ there can be leadership


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

practices designed to influence teachers’ work practices that never get recognised by

them as such. This being true, it is also important to stress that the practices and

interaction of peers that do get recognised as influential may play a particularly

significant part in teachers’ professional development and thus deserve to be studied

in their own right. Moreover, evidence collected on teachers’ joint work helps

leadership analysts move beyond mere cognitions and thus helps attenuate the

potential shortcomings of focusing solely on attributions of influence.

It is only by collecting information on every department member and his or

her relations with the others that one can grasp teacher leaders’ immediate social

context �/ the overall web of influence relations that exist within their department.

Methodologically, this is an appropriate way to identify leadership distribution ‘not

only among appointed leaders but also among de facto leaders �/ that is, individuals

who, regardless of their position, exercise influence on others’ (Spillane 2006, 32). In

short, the potential multidirectional, interactive nature of distributed teacher

leadership in educational organisations calls for the utilisation of a social network

research approach.

This perspective is consistent with Ogawa and Bossert’s (1995) view that

leadership is not embedded in particular roles, but rather in a network of

relationships that exist among incumbents of roles, both formal and informal �/ in

other words, ‘leadership is systemic and relational’; ‘the interact, not the act,

becomes the basic building block of organisational leadership’ (236). This is also

consistent with Spillane’s (2006, 56) argument that while the actions of leaders are

important, it is in the interactions among actors that leadership practice gets

constructed. As the author puts it, ‘interactions are key; therefore, it is essential to

analyze leadership practice from the level of the group or collective’ (56).

As I have stated previously, leadership cannot be identified solely through the

examination of actors’ attributions of influence, however important they are.

Researchers also need to analyse the actual configurations of actors’ joint profes-

sional practices. One important form of joint practice in schools is professional

collaboration. In many schools, this is the primary means by which teacher leaders

exert influence (Lieberman and Miller 2004; York-Barr and Duke 2004). As Turner

(1996) notes, ‘one very important aspect of the head of department role is to

organise, manage and lead a team of teachers’ (205; see also Gronn 2003a). Strong

professional teacher leaders collaborate professionally with their colleagues and,

importantly, they are also able to make them collaborate with one another. Of course,

there are also circumstances in which ‘working together is sufficient but not

necessary; while school leaders sometimes work together, at other times, they work

separately yet interdependently’ (Spillane 2006, 16�/17). Even though these forms of

interdependence are recognised as important, they are not discussed in the present

paper.

Two social network analysis concepts are particularly relevant for understanding

attributional and structural leadership patterns within groups of teachers. One is

centrality, a measure that describes an actor’s prominence or prestige within a

network (Freeman 1979; Bonacich 1987; Friedkin 1991; Borgatti and Everett 2006).

166 J.A. de Lima

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

Teacher leaders are prominent and prestigious actors in their networks because they

are involved in many professional ties to other colleagues and are regarded by them as

particularly influential in promoting their professional development.

A second relevant concept is network density, which refers to the amount of actual

network ties that exist in a given network, compared with the total of potential ties

that are theoretically possible in that network (Wasserman and Faust 1994). A

system of distributed leadership implies high leadership density, both because there

will be several people (in both formal and informal roles), and not only one, who are

regarded by other network members as influential, and also because leaders will be

active and effective in making their colleagues work together to improve and develop

as professionals, and to develop their potential as professional leaders themselves.

This will produce high leadership density levels within these networks.

It is useful to think of distributed teacher leadership in terms of these network

concepts. In the traditional, formal focused leadership model, if heads of department

exercise their professional leadership functions in full, and if they are effective in

doing so, they will enjoy high centrality in their department’s networks. Also, their

networks will be strongly centralised around them. The implication is that other

teachers besides the formal leader will be relatively peripheral people in terms of the

amount of leadership activity that they actually develop or in which they are involved.

However, as we have seen, this scenario is contrary to the philosophy of a distributed

teacher leadership system. Indeed, in the latter case, if we took an extreme

interpretation of distribution and admitted that every teacher can be a professional

leader of his or her colleagues, then networks of relations would have to be highly

dense, which would make it technically impossible for any actor to enjoy high

centrality or to enjoy a high share of the overall centrality of the teacher network.

Therefore, in practice, in more advanced stages, distributed leadership systems imply

low actor centralities and shares, low network centralisation and high densities in the

networks of ties among actors. Of course, this is an extreme version of leadership

distribution and it is likely that most ‘distributed’ systems will lie somewhere between

these two extremes, as a function of each school’s and each department’s context and

history. The analysis that follows illustrates one way of examining how near or far

departments (and their respective coordinators) are from these extreme theoretical

possibilities; in other words, the extent to which the leadership functions that are

formally distributed to department heads and those that are informally constructed

via teachers’ interactions with their peers are associated with actual staff perceptions

and practices that are consistent with a distributed professional leadership model.

The study

The present study was not designed in an explicit way as a study of teacher

leadership, but the data that it collected are particularly useful for assessing how far

teacher leadership was exercised and distributed within the participating institu-

tions.1


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

Research questions

This paper addresses two main research questions:

. To what extent do department coordinators, to whom leadership has been

formally distributed, actually exercise professional leadership in relation to their

colleagues?

. Besides department coordinators, are there other teachers within departments

who play a professional leadership role? In other words, is professional leadership

distributed beyond formal role positions within departments?

Sample

A purposeful sample was used. The study was conducted in two Portuguese schools:

a secondary school (School A) and a Basic Integrated School2 (School B). School A

comprised 33 teaching staff, distributed among four departments (D1 to D4).3

School B employed 83 teachers, organised into eight departments (D5 to D12).

Instrument and data collection

A department social network questionnaire (see Appendix 1) was distributed to all

staff members in each department, focusing on department colleagues’ impact on

one another’s professional development, and on their collaborative relations within

the department.

With regard to colleagues’ impact on one another’s professional development, for

each colleague in the department respondents indicated how much they felt that that

colleague had influenced their own professional development. Responses ranged

from 1 (‘did not contribute at all to my development’) to 5 (‘contributed totally to

my development’). Colleagues to whom respondents attributed high scores of impact

were thus considered as particularly influential upon their professional development

as teachers.

As for collaborative relations within the department, each department member

indicated the colleagues with whom he or she exchanged teaching materials,

developed materials jointly and/or planned his/her work jointly. Of course, these

areas do not exhaust the full range of potential domains in which professional

leadership may be exercised in schools, but they do correspond to key types of

collaborative practices that have been highlighted as significant in the literature on

teacher collaboration and department learning communities (Little 1982, 1990;

McLaughlin and Talbert 2001). Respondents were asked to indicate how often they

developed each of these relations with each of their colleagues, on average, each

school term. The data were collected in the spring of 2003. Response rates were

90.9% in School A and 88% in School B. Results are presented exclusively for

department members who responded to the network questionnaire.

168 J.A. de Lima

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

Measures

The two network concepts highlighted previously in the network approach to

distributed teacher leadership were operationalised in the study in the following

manner.

Actor centrality

In social network terms, an actor that is involved in more relations than the others in

his or her network or who receives more choices from them is more central in that

network. The measurement of actor centrality depends on the type of tie involved.

For ties that are asymmetrical (that is, in which an actor may choose or nominate

another with regard to a specific relation, but not be nominated or chosen by that

same person), we may calculate two types of measures: indegree (the number of

choices or nominations the actor receives in his or her network) and outdegree (the

number of choices or nominations the actor makes with regard to others in that

network). For ties that are inherently symmetrical (i.e. in which a tie from actor A to B

necessarily implies the same tie from B to A), we simply calculate each actor’s degree

(the number of ties in which he or she is involved in his or her network, in a specific

type of relation).

To determine teachers’ centrality scores in the influence network (an asymmetrical

type of relation), for each teacher, I calculated the actor’s indegree, or prestige �/ the

number of choices he or she received, that is, the number of colleagues who

considered him/her to have a strong (score�4) or very strong (score�5) impact on

their professional development. Then, in the resulting attributed influence network,

in order to avoid bias due to the different network sizes of different departments, for

each teacher, I normalised the indegree scores. A high normalised centrality score

means that the teacher in question was regarded by many of his or her colleagues as a

highly influential colleague in terms of their professional development.

In the networks of actual collaborative relations (symmetrical relations), centrality

analyses focused on collegial ties that entailed a minimum of two contacts per school

term. In this case, for each type of collaborative relation, each teacher’s degree (that

is, the number of department colleagues with whom he or she collaborated) was

determined. These scores were also normalised. In this case, a high centrality score

indicates that the teacher in question was involved with many colleagues in

professional relations in his or her department.

Rank order of actors’ centrality

For each type of relation under analysis, all actors in each department were rank-

ordered on the basis of their normalised centrality. Each teacher was given a rank

order number. This helped arrange the members of each department, from the most


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

central to the least central, and determine what rank department coordinators, as

well as other teacher leaders, occupied in each type of relation under analysis.

Centrality share

This was calculated as the centrality measure of the actor, divided by the sum of all

the actor centralities in the network (Borgatti et al. 2002). The measure indicates the

relative weight of each actor’s centrality in the context of all centralities in his/her

department. This was calculated for the department coordinator and for all the other

teachers in each department. A teacher’s high share score indicates that his or her

network’s centralisation (see below) is due primarily to his or her centrality within it.

In other words, in relative terms, the teacher in question is a particularly influential

actor, when compared with the others in his or her network.

Department network centralisation

Network centralisation measures the extent to which each network in each

department was focused around a unique actor, and is expressed as a percentage

ranging from 0 (all actors enjoyed the same centrality �/ i.e. there was no central

actor) to 100 (the network was totally organised around a single central actor, with all

the others remaining unconnected to one another, except to him or her). A high

centralisation in a given network indicates that actor centralities are rather unevenly

distributed in that network. In its extreme form (centralisation�100%), there is only

one central actor. In other words, a high centralisation score indicates that one or a

few teachers, at the most, are particularly central in the network, while all the others

are much more peripheral.

Department network density

The network density measure indicates the proportion of relations that are actually

present in a network, relative to the total of relations that are theoretically possible in

that network. Network densities vary from 0 (none of the theoretically possible

relations exist) to 1 (all possible relations are maintained). Low densities indicate a

lack of distribution of leadership within a department, as well as a low effectiveness

of the leader in having staff work together and stimulating their professional

development.

Analysis

All data were analysed with the centrality and density routines included in the

UCINET VI program (Borgatti et al. 2002).

170 J.A. de Lima

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

Results

Perceptions of colleagues’ impact on one another’s professional

development

Results on teachers’ perceptions of their colleagues’ impact on their professional

development are summarised in Table 1.4 The results point to four distinct types of

leadership configurations in the networks of the 12 departments:

. Focused, formal leadership. This configuration was identified in four departments

(D2, D5, D9 and D12). In these organisational units, the department coordinator

was perceived as the key actor in the department; he or she was regarded by his or

her colleagues as the key professional leader in the department; that is, as the

person that most strongly influenced their professional development.

. Multiple leadership (five departments �/ D3, D4, D7, D8 and D11). In this case, the

department coordinator was regarded as a key actor in the department, but this

network position was shared with other teachers. In this type of configuration,

leadership was distributed within the department and it extended beyond the

formal role of department coordinator; the coordinator was an important

professional leader but, in the eyes of his or her colleagues, other staff also played

a similar, influential role.

. Alternative, informal leadership (one department �/ D10). In this network config-

uration, the department coordinator was a less central actor in the department,

while the most central position was occupied by a different colleague. The formal

distribution of leadership to the department coordinator did not produce the

expected effect; it was another teacher, rather than the coordinator, who was

regarded as influential.

. Leadership void (two departments �/ D1 and D6). In this network configuration, the

department coordinator was one among a majority of isolated members in the

department. While there was formally a designated leader, he or she was not

regarded by his or her colleagues as an important, influential colleague. Moreover,

no one else in the department emerged as an alternative, strong leader that

performed this professional role.

Let us analyse more closely how these four types of leadership configuration played

out in practice. For each configuration, I have chosen one example which is

illustrated with a sociogram, where the department coordinator is highlighted with a

black dot within a circle.

Focused, formal leadership

In department D5 (Sociogram 1), the department coordinator was clearly the key

person highlighted by the other staff as being particularly influential on their

professional development. The department was staffed by 13 teachers who worked

under the formal coordination of Dirceu, the department coordinator. Dirceu was


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

named by nine colleagues as someone who played an important role in their

professional development. He was by far the most prominent actor in this respect

(the colleagues who came closest �/ Dina, Edna and Edite �/ were referred to by only

three colleagues each). Dirceu’s normalised centrality was 75.00 (the highest in the

whole study), and his share of the department’s overall centrality was 0.33. The

department was strongly centralised around Dirceu in this particular type of relation

(62.5%, which was also the highest centralisation score in the study). However, the

department density for this relation was only 0.27, which suggests that only a quarter

of all possible relations were characterised by a strong perceived impact of colleagues

upon one another’s development as educators. This contrasts with the density score

(0.48) that was found in D2, where the department coordinator was a somewhat less

central figure than Dirceu. This suggests that we should not infer from a high

normalised centrality, a high share and/or a high degree of centralisation that the

department coordinator is being totally effective in her/his role as a facilitator/

instigator of teacher professional development within it, as will become clear shortly,

when we turn to teachers’ actual patterns of professional interaction.

Multiple leadership

In five of the departments under study, respondents’ perceptions of professional

influence on colleagues’ professional development suggested that besides the

department coordinator, there were other teachers who informally performed this

Table 1. Summary of results regarding teachers’ perceptions of the impact of department

colleagues on their professional development (strong or very strong impact)

Department

(Department

coordinator)

Department

coordinator’s

normalised

centrality

Department

coordinator’s

indegree share

Department

coordinator’s

rank order of

centrality

Department

degree of

centralisation

Department

density

School A

D1 (Gisela) 0.00 0.00 2-7/7 16.67 0.05

D2 (Isa) 66.67 0.36 1/7 47.22 0.48

D3 (Guido) 25.00 0.15 1-6/9 7.81 0.22

D4 (Lia) 40.00 0.33 1-2/6 24.00 0.40

School B

D5 (Dirceu) 75.00 0.33 1/13 62.5 0.27

D6 (Laura) 0.00 0.00 2-7/7 50.00 0.14

D7 (Erica) 66.67 0.09 1-3/13 11.81 0.77

D8 (Ada) 50.0 0.28 1-2/11 37.00 0.22

D9 (Antao) 33.33 0.25 1/7 16.67 0.33

D10 (Berta) 0.0 0.00 2-3/3 50.0 0.33

D11 (Lisa) 45.46 0.17 1-2/12 24.79 0.35

D12 (Sonia) 50.00 0.23 1/7 22.20 0.52

172 J.A. de Lima

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

role. In other words, besides the department coordinator, the leadership function in

this context was distributed among a set of equally influential individuals. To

illustrate this, it is worth looking more closely at D8 (Sociogram 2). This department

comprised 11 teachers and was headed by Ada, who had a normalised centrality

score of 50.0 and a share of 0.28. Ada shared the top rank of attributed centrality in

the department with Adılia, a colleague who enjoyed identical centrality and share

scores. There were thus two strong leaders in the department, one in a formal

position and the other in an informal one.

Alternative, informal leadership

In one of the departments in the study (D10, comprising only three teachers �/

Sociogram 3), the department coordinator (Berta) was an isolated actor; the most

central position was occupied by another colleague (Davide). Thus, Davide

performed an informal leadership role, as reflected in his colleague’s perceptions

of his impact on their professional development being stronger than Berta’s.


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

Leadership void

Finally, in two departments (D1 and D6), the department coordinator was a very

marginal actor, merely one among a set of equally isolated teachers. Let us take the

example of D1 (Sociogram 4), a department staffed by seven teachers. Gisela, the

department coordinator, had null centrality and, consequently, a null share of all

department centralities. In other words, no teacher in the department regarded her

as being important in their professional development. Moreover, only one teacher

(Felix) received a nomination from a colleague (Ilda) in this respect. In this network

of attributed influence, the department displayed a low degree of centralisation

(16.67%), and a very low density level (0.05). Generally, colleagues regarded one

another as inconsequential for each other’s development as professionals.

But cognitions (influence attributions) tell us only part of the story of department

coordinators’ impact on the professional operation of their departments. To get a

more comprehensive picture of this impact, we need to examine the actual work

practices in which colleagues engaged with one another and with their department

coordinators, so as to examine how far perceptions of influence were complemented

by actual collaborative practices. To understand this side of department coordinators’

and other leaders’ impact on the work life of their departments, I turn next to the

examination of the networks of actual collaborative ties that existed within these units.

174 J.A. de Lima

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

Department coordinators’ patterns of professional interaction with their

colleagues

Results on teachers’ relations with their departmental colleagues in the three relevant

areas of their work life which were researched (exchange of teaching materials, joint

development of materials, and collaborative lesson planning) are summarised in

Table 2. It is useful to read these results in the light of the classification that was put

forward previously with regard to department-level leadership configurations:

. In the four departments with perceived focused, formal leadership, while heads of

department were regarded as the most influential people in the department in

terms of their impact on their colleagues’ professional development, their actual

involvement in collaborative relations with those colleagues and their effectiveness

in making them work collaboratively were minimal.

. In the five departments with a perceived multiple leadership configuration, some-

times department coordinators and other informal leaders were also prominent

actors with regard to actual collaborative activities, but their prominence in these

relations was lower than in the perceived influence networks and the collaborative

density of their networks was also generally low, which means that they were also

not effective in developing a collaborative culture among their colleagues.


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

. In the department with an alternative, informal leadership configuration, where the

most central position was occupied by a teacher other than the head, while the

department coordinator’s centrality and share were relatively low in terms of

actual collaborative work, when compared with those of the informal leader,

network densities were moderate to high, which suggests that the alternative leader

was a relatively effective professional leader in this respect. However, the small size

of the department warrants care in this interpretation.

. Finally, in the two departments with a leadership void configuration, department

coordinators’ centralities were null with regard to collaborative practices and the

densities of collegial relations in their departments were also low to very low. In

these departments, the formal coordinators were totally marginal actors in relation

to the few collegial ties that were maintained among department members, and no

other staff member emerged as a leader capable of stimulating colleagues in the

pursuit of significant joint collaborative efforts. In them, no one was perceived as

particularly important for colleagues’ professional development, no one stood out

as being a particularly active member in terms of joint work, and no one managed

to spur colleagues into collaborative activities that helped them mutually stimulate

their development as professionals. The leadership void that resulted from low

176 J.A. de Lima

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

leadership centrality and low leadership density helped perpetuate an isolated

professional culture in these departments.

Discussion and conclusions

This study of teacher leadership in curriculum departments in two schools adopted an

attributional and relational approach to distributed leadership in schools which

focused on formal leaders’ and other teachers’ professional perceptions and

interactions. This was based on the belief that the main medium through which

professional leadership is exercised in schools is social interaction with colleagues.

This was the key reason for adopting a network approach to the issues that were

researched. The data refer to patterns of mutual professional influence and actual

professional collaboration in key areas of teachers’ work in 12 departments. The

findings of the study may be summarised in two main conclusions. First, in a policy

system that formally distributed leadership among departments, teacher leadership in

the two case-study schools and their departments took on distinct configurations.

Four leadership configurations were identified: focused leadership, multiple leader-

ship, alternative informal leadership, and leadership void. In the four departments

with a focused, formal leadership configuration, department coordinators were regarded

by their peers as particularly important people in their development as professionals.

In the five departments with multiple leadership, department heads’ influence over their

colleagues was paralleled by the influence of other prominent, prestigious teachers

who were regarded by their colleagues as people who were crucial in their professional

development. One department displayed an alternative, informal leadership configura-

tion. Here, the department coordinator was regarded by colleagues as a marginal

actor and the actual professional leadership role was performed informally by a

teacher who was not officially endowed with that function. Finally, two departments

displayed a leadership void: neither the department head nor any other colleague was

perceived by the staff as significant for their professional development. This

multiplicity of configurations shows that systems of leadership that are formally

distributed may comprise a variety of informal network patterns of leadership, many

of which do not confirm the supposed virtues of the leadership distribution. It is only

by looking empirically at teachers’ attributions of influence and their actual

professional ties to one another that we can determine if a given system of leadership

is really distributed and what structural form this distribution takes.

A key claim made in this paper is that to determine leaders’ actual impact on the

work experience of their colleagues, information on influence attributions is not

sufficient; we also need to examine teachers’ actual patterns of interaction with one

another and to verify the extent to which the networks that result from these contacts

display concrete distributed patterns of leadership. This brings us to the second main

finding of the study. While at the strictly cognitive level the evidence collected in

several departments did suggest the presence of distributed patterns of leadership, in

practice, little professional leadership seemed to be exercised, either by the formal


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

Table 2. Summary of main results regarding teachers’ professional relations (at least twice each school term)

Department Type of relation

Department

coordinator’s

normalised

centrality

Department

coordinator’s

share

Department

coordinator’s

rank order of

centrality

Department

degree of

centralisation

Department

density

School A

Exchange materials 0.00 0.00 4�/7/7 27.78 0.10

D1 (Gisela) Develop materials jointly 0.00 0.00 3�/7/7 16.67 0.05

Plan lessons jointly 0.00 0.00 4�/7/7 33.33 0.10

Exchange materials 33.33 0.33 1/7 22.22 0.14

D2 (Isa) Develop materials jointly 0.00 0.00 �/ 0.0 0.00

Plan lessons jointly 0.00 0.00 �/ 0.00 0.00


D3 (Guido) Develop materials jointly 25.00 0.14 1�/6/9 7.14 0.19



D4 (Lia) Develop materials jointly 0.00 0.00 5�/6/6 10.00 0.13


School B


D5 (Dirceu) Develop materials jointly 8.33 0.06 6�/9/13 17.42 0.10



D6 (Laura) Develop materials jointly 0.00 0.00 4�/7/7 33.33 0.10



D7 (Erica) Develop materials jointly 16.67 0.08 5�/9/13 19.70 0.17


Exchange materials 30.00 0.25 1/11 21.00 0.11

D8 (Ada) Develop materials jointly 10.00 0.17 2�/5/11 17.78 0.05

Plan lessons jointly 20.00 0.33 1/11 17.78 0.05

178

J.A.

de

Lim

a

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

Table 2 (continued)

Department Type of relation

Department

coordinator’s

normalised

centrality

Department

coordinator’s

share

Department

coordinator’s

rank order of

centrality

Department

degree of

centralisation

Department

density


D9 (Antao) Develop materials jointly 0.00 0.00 �/ 0.0 0.0



D10 (Berta) Develop materials jointly 50.00 0.25 2�/3/3 100.0 0.67

Plan lessons jointly 0.00 0.00 3/3 50.0 0.33


D11 (Lisa) Develop materials jointly 9.09 0.08 3�/9/12 21.82 0.09



D12 (Sonia) Develop materials jointly 0.00 0.00 3�/7/7 16.67 0.05

Plan lessons jointly 0.00 0.00 �/ 0.00 0.00

Sch

oolL

eadersh

ipand

Managem

ent

179

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

leaders or by other emerging leaders, in important areas of teachers’ work, namely the

exchange of teaching materials, the joint development of materials, and the joint

planning of lessons. In these departments, network densities were generally low in the

three types of professional interaction, which indicates that, regardless of the perceived

leadership configuration, most teacher leaders were not effective in creating a culture

where teachers collaborated frequently with one another on professional matters.

These results suggest an overall picture of weakly distributed leadership in two

schools which are part of an educational system that relies heavily on the influence of

department coordinators for ensuring their colleagues’ professional development and

teamwork. The policy climate in the case-study schools would appear to give middle

managers an opportunity to contribute to the professional development of their

colleagues, by enabling them to grow as teachers, both through their interaction with

their department coordinator and through their involvement in significant profes-

sional exchanges with their other colleagues. However, the results of the study point

to the rarity and the weakness of both formal and alternative, informal forms of

leadership in the two schools, with few teachers showing as particularly prominent

actors in the professional networks of their departments. The formal distributed

structure did not generate an actual dispersed pattern of teacher leadership.

One main conclusion is thus that to make leadership an organisational quality

(Ogawa and Bossert 1995) it is not sufficient to distribute it formally; it needs to

become embedded in teachers’ professional practices and work habits. Moreover, the

determination of the degree of distribution of a system of leadership cannot be

regarded mainly as a question of organisational design; it must be viewed as an

empirical question. One way to approach this question empirically is to analyse

teachers’ networks and to determine whether or not their leadership centrality and

density patterns take on distributed configurations.

Department networks characterised by high network density and moderate

centralisation in matters of professional influence and collaborative work, and where

the department head is as central as several other prominent department colleagues,

would be good examples of strong departmental communities with distributed

professional leadership patterns. However, the results show that a combination of

low network density, low centralisation and low department coordinator centrality

was more common than distributed patterns of leadership, either of a formal or an

informal nature. This can have important consequences for teacher leadership and

community. Without strong perceptions of mutual professional influence and

frequent joint work, teachers may not benefit from the advantages of openly sharing

materials, strategies and expertise, of working together on common teaching

problems, and of critically and reflectively examining student work.

The findings of the study raise a key issue: why was there so little professional

leadership in the case-study schools? At a more speculative level, one may think that

several conditions may have worked against the widespread exercise of this type of

leadership in these organisations. Two conditions may have been particularly relevant

in this respect. First, in Portuguese schools, incumbents of formal department

leadership roles are not chosen by their school leaders �/ rather, they are elected by their

180 J.A. de Lima

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

department peers, and there is no evidence to suggest that these colleagues use

professional or pedagogical criteria in electing their coordinator. A congenial rather

than collegial culture may develop, where colleagues may see one another more as

equals than as people who may evaluate, judge and interfere in others’ professional

activities. A prevailing culture of professional isolation (which was apparent in the

networks of the 12 case-study departments) and of non-interference may protect

teachers from active interventions from their department heads in respect of their work

practices. Research conducted elsewhere (Little 1982, 1985) suggests that many

teachers are reluctant to fully assume the responsibility of making decisions that are

often regarded as negative by those who are affected by them, which means that some

teachers may choose to elect colleagues who do not question the status quo within their

department, rather than people who challenge them and put pressure on them to

change. The norms of egalitarian status and non-interference that prevail in some

departments may be major obstacles to the exercise of professional leadership among

colleagues. Even in contexts where department leaders are appointed by school leaders

or other educational authorities, rather than elected by their peers, there is ‘a constant

tension between the desire to ensure conformity to a common set of standards [within

the department] whilst respecting the autonomy of individual teachers’ (Aubrey-

Hopkins and James 2002, 317). This tension may be even greater and more paralysing

when department coordinators are not endowed formally with some degree of

professional legitimacy for intervening directly in their colleagues’ work performance.

Second, in the schools that participated in the study, leadership role occupants had

not received explicit and extended training in leadership. Indeed, in Portugal, there is

currently very little training specifically designed for department heads. Many leaders

may have simply not known how best to proceed in pushing forward the development

of their department colleagues. One possible solution for this problem might be to

target middle-level leadership and management as a priority area in staff develop-

ment initiatives.

Still other factors may have helped produce the network patterns that were

identified, such as the time allocations that department heads were given to lead and

manage their departments, their overall workload, department staff morale, rates of

staff turnover in the department, staff experience, department members’ full- or part-

time status, the stability of subject specialists within the department, heads’ leadership

styles, the history of innovation of the departments, and many other factors. As Busher

and Harris (1999) observe in another context, ‘the very fact that departments vary in

size, configuration, status, resource power and staff expertise makes the job of each

department coordinator contextually different from that experienced by other heads of

department either within the same school, or in other schools’ (p. 308). This

underscores the need to do more research on this issue that combines network analysis

concepts and techniques with qualitative and interpretive approaches to teachers’ and

leaders’ work which collect evidence on these issues. Indeed, we need to question

whether the means of data collection that have traditionally been used in leadership

research yield accurate information on distributed leadership practice in the workplace

(Gronn 2003a). Spillane’s (2006) use of mixed methods (including ethnography,


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

interviews, structured observations and videos of leadership activities) is an excellent

example of a more comprehensive approach to the study of these practices.

A final key factor that may have been associated with the leadership patterns that

were identified in the department networks is the schools’ top-level leadership and its

relation to each department’s leadership and culture. Indeed, since few department

heads in the case-study schools actually exercised professional leadership in their

departments, the results of the study raise issues related to the need for top school

leadership intervention in this respect. In other words, although no direct evidence

was collected on department leaders’ relations with their school leaders, the low

effectiveness of these middle-level leaders in developing teacher collaboration and

mutual learning justifies a reflection on the role of the school management team in

the promotion of teacher leadership.

An important function of top formal leaders in schools is to prepare and nurture

the space for distributed leadership to occur in their organisation (Hopkins and

Jackson 2002, quoted by Harris 2004, p. 15). In many institutions, distributed

leadership (which relies on the assumption that the organisation must have multiple

leaders) may not prosper without a vigorous push from the so often demonised

individual leadership of the person at the top. Rather than being regarded as

mutually exclusive forms of leadership, focused and distributed leadership forms may

need to be seen as complementary.

MacBeath’s (2005) developmental model of distributed leadership clearly demon-

strates that heads of school may have to play a key role in the promotion of the

leadership capacity of their institutions: they must identify the leadership needs of their

school, look for people who have the necessary potential or capacities to satisfy those

needs, assign responsibilities to them, provide opportunities for them to get training

and improve their capacity, and create conditions for them to share their expertise with

others, so that they can empower their colleagues and stimulate even more leadership

activity within the school. All of this requires ‘a high level of developmental activity on

the part of the headteacher’ (MacBeath 2005, 364). It is in this sense that Barth (2001)

states that ‘good principals are more hero-makers than heroes’ (p. 448).

However, in Portuguese schools, school leaders’ actual power to intervene in this

domain is significantly restricted by legal, organisational and cultural factors. In

particular, their authority to command in professional and pedagogical issues is

severely limited. First, as mentioned above, department leaders are elected among

teachers within departments, not appointed by the school leadership team. This

means that department heads may develop policies, pursue agendas and adopt

leadership styles that are not aligned with those favoured by the school leadership

team, which can do very little in that respect. Second, teachers are employed by the

central state, not by schools or local authorities, which means that each teacher’s

work contract and even his or her career progression is largely unaffected by how

effective or ineffective he or she is as a teacher leader, unless his or her practice is so

exceptionally poor that it warrants the implementation of statutory procedures. And

third, Portuguese school leaders themselves are democratically elected mostly by the

teaching staff. This generates limitations and constraints upon their ability to actually

182 J.A. de Lima

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

perform their role as change-oriented school leaders, since the position is largely

controlled by the teaching staff and overtly dependent on it (for a similar argument

with regard to Spain, see Bolıvar and Moreno 2006). Therefore, the promotion of

teacher leadership that is more genuinely distributed and more authentically

professional may entail cultural and structural changes in schools, changes that

relate both to the department and the whole-school level, and which rethink how

leaders are selected and what it is legitimate to expect of them in terms of the way

they relate to their colleagues. While this article was going to press, the Portuguese

government put forward a new set of legislative initiatives that aimed at changing the

power structure within schools. It remains to be seen what the actual formal

configuration of leadership roles that results from these initiatives will be and what

impact this will have on teacher leadership activity in Portuguese schools.

The present paper illustrates how teacher leadership was exercised in 12

departments located in two schools. It demonstrates the value of a network approach

that locates teachers’ professional perceptions and interactions within their depart-

ments, and discusses some implications of the findings for leadership research, policy

and practice. However, the study has certain limitations. Some of these have been

referred to and discussed throughout the paper. A few others deserve a final note.

First, while theoretically the study adopted a broad view of professional leadership, in

practice it focused only on a relatively limited set of professionally relevant areas.

While these are clearly significant in terms of professional leadership, further

research is needed to address other areas where distributed leadership may be

exercised in schools. Also, department coordinators and other teacher leaders may

influence their colleagues through many other means, such as using department

meetings as occasions to influence practice, peer observation, delegation of

department leadership tasks, communicating formally and informally with collea-

gues, both collectively and individually, etc. Third, the absence in the literature of

normative values of centrality, centralisation and density with which to compare the

values obtained in the present study makes it impossible to compare the leadership

configurations that were identified with data from other contexts. More research

using network concepts and techniques is needed to develop a knowledge base from

which more solid conclusions and comparisons can be drawn and developed. Fourth,

the small sample on which the study is based implies that no generalisation of the

results is warranted. Finally, the difference in department size may (to some extent)

have influenced the leadership configurations that were detected. More work in more

departments of varying sizes is needed to control this variable in future studies of

teacher networks and leadership distribution in schools.

Notes on contributor

Jorge Avila de Lima is associate professor at the Department of Education,

University of the Azores, Portugal. He has published nationally and inter-

nationally on issues such as teacher collaboration, school cultures and social

networks in education.


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

Notes

1. The study was part of an international research project partially supported by SALTSA.

SALTSA is a joint programme for working life research in Europe. It is a joint undertaking

by the three Swedish confederations of employees (Trade Unions) �/ LO, TCO, SACO �/ and

the National Institute for Working Life, which is based in Stockholm. The purpose of the

programme is to facilitate problem-oriented research collaboration on working-life-related

issues in Europe.

2. Basic Integrated Schools are a recently created model of school organisation in Portugal that

brings together several levels of basic (i.e. compulsory) education, organisationally, under

the same school, the same senior management team and the same educational project. The

aim is to provide pupils with continuity and coherence in their experience of schooling, from

kindergarten until the end of compulsory education (grade 9). The Basic Integrated School

that participated in the study (School B) employed primary teachers (who were organised

into a department), a well as staff teaching in the second cycle (grades 5 and 6) and in the

third cycle (grades 7 to 9). In the latter cycles, teachers were also organised into

departments, on the basis of the subjects or curriculum areas in which they taught.

3. The small number of staff and of departments in School A meant that each department

comprised teachers teaching different subjects (usually, similar subjects within a broadly

similar curriculum area).

4. These results are restricted to perceptions of a strong or very strong impact (scores 4 or 5, in

a scale of 1�nil impact to 5�very strong impact).

References

Aubrey-Hopkins, J., and C. James. 2002. Improving practice in subject departments: The

experience of secondary school subject leaders in Wales. School Leadership and Management

22, no. 3: 305�/320.

Ball, S.J., and R. Bowe. 1992. Subject departments and the ‘implementation’ of National

Curriculum policies: An overview of the issues. Journal of Curriculum Studies 24, no. 2:

97�/115.

Barry, D. 1991. Managing the bossless team: Lessons in distributed leadership. Organisational

Dynamics 20, no. 1: 31�/47.

Barth, R.S. 2001. Teacher leader. Phi Delta Kappan 82: 443�/449.

Bennett, N. 1995. Managing professional teachers: Middle management in primary and secondary

schools. London: Paul Chapman.

Blase, J., and J. Blase. 2004. Handbook of instructional leadership: How successful principals promote

teaching and learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Bolıvar, A., and J.M. Moreno. 2006. Between transaction and transformation: The role of school

principals as education leaders in Spain. Journal of Educational Change 7: 19�/31.

Bonacich, P. 1987. Power and centrality: A family of measures. American Journal of Sociology 92,

no. 5: 1170�/1182.

Borgatti, S.P., and M.G. Everett. 2006. A graph-theoretic perspective on centrality. Social Networks

28: 466�/484.

Borgatti, S., M. Everett, and L.C. Freeman. 2002. UCINET for Windows. Lexington, KY: Analytic

Technologies.

Brown, M., D. Rutherford, and B. Boyle. 2000. Leadership for school improvement: the role of the

head of department in UK secondary schools. School Effectiveness and School Improvement 11,

no. 2: 237�/258.

184 J.A. de Lima

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

Burlingame M. 1987. Images of leadership in the effective schools literature. In Instructional

leadership: Concepts, issues, and controversies, ed. W. Greenfield, pp. 3�/16: Toronto: Allyn &

Bacon.

Busher, H., and A. Harris. 1999. Leadership of school subject areas: Tensions and dimensions of

managing in the middle. School Leadership and Management 19, no. 3: 305�/317.

Busher, H., A. Harris, and C. Wise. 2001. Subject leadership and school improvement. London: Paul

Chapman.

Camburn, E., B. Rowan., and J.E. Taylor. 2003. Distributed leadership in schools: The case of

elementary schools adopting comprehensive school reform models. Educational Evaluation

and Policy Analysis 25, no. 4: 347�/373.

Day, C., and A. Harris. 2002. Teacher leadership, reflective practice, and school improvement. In

Second International Handbook of Educational Leadership and Administration, Part 2, eds. K.

Leithwood and P. Hallinger, pp. 957�/955. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Freeman, L.C. 1979. Centrality in social networks: Conceptual clarification. Social Networks 1, no.

3: 215�/239.

Friedkin, N. 1991. Theoretical foundations for centrality measures. American Journal of Sociology

96, no. 6: 1478�/1504.

Frost, D. and A. Harris. 2003. Teacher leadership: Towards a research agenda. Cambridge Journal

of Education 33, no. 3: 479�/498.

Glickman, K.D., S.P. Gordon, and J.M. Ross-Gordon. 2001. Supervision and instructional

leadership: A developmental approach, Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Glover, D.C., D. Gleeson, G. Gough, and M. Johnson. 1998. The meaning of management: The

development needs of middle managers in secondary schools. Educational Management and

Administration 26, no. 3: 279�/292.

Glover, D.C., D. Miller, M. Gambling, G. Gough, and M. Johnson. 1999. As others see us: senior

management and subject staff perceptions of the work effectiveness of subject leaders in

secondary schools. School Leadership and Management 19, no. 3: 331�/344.

Gronn, P. 2000. Distributed properties: A new architecture for leadership. Educational Management

and Administration 28, no. 3: 371�/388.

*/*/*/. 2003a. The new work of educational leaders: Changing leadership practice in an era of school

reform. London: Paul Chapman.

*/*/*/. 2003b. Leadership: who needs it? School Leadership and Management 23, no. 3: 267�/290.

Hallinger, P. 2003. Leading educational change: Reflections on the practice of instructional and

transformational leadership. Cambridge Journal of Education 33, no. 3: 329�/351.

Harris, A. 2000. Effective leadership and departmental improvement. Westminster Studies in

Education 23: 81�/90.

*/*/*/. 2003. Teacher leadership as distributed leadership: Heresy, fantasy or possibility? School

Leadership and Management 23, no. 3: 313�/324.

*/*/*/. 2004. Distributed leadership and school improvement. Educational Management Admin-

istration and Leadership 32, no. 1: 11�/24.

Harris, A., I. Jamieson, and J. Russ. 1995. A study of ‘effective’ departments in secondary schools.

School Organization 15, no. 3: 283�/299.

Harris, A., and D. Muijs. 2002. Teacher leadership: principles and practice. http://www.ncsl.org.

uk/mediastore/image2/randd-teacher-leadership-summary.pdf

Katzenmeyer, M., and G. Moller. 1996. Awakening the sleeping giant: Leadership development for

teachers. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Lieberman, A., and L. Miller. 2004. Teacher leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Little, J.W. 1982. Norms of collegiality and experimentation: Workplace conditions of school

success. American Educational Research Journal 19, no. 3: 325�/340.

*/*/*/. 1985. Teachers as teacher advisors: The delicacy of collegial leadership. Educational

Leadership 43, no. 3: 34�/36.


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

*/*/*/. 1990. The persistence of privacy: Autonomy and initiative in teachers’ professional

relations. Teachers College Record 91, no. 4: 509�/536.

*/*/*/. 1995. Contested ground: The basis of teacher leadership in two restructuring high schools.

The Elementary School Journal 96, no. 1: 47�/62.

*/*/*/. 2003. Constructions of teacher leadership in three periods of policy and reform activism.

School Leadership and Management 23, no. 4: 401�/419.

MacBeath, J. 2005. Leadership as distributed: A matter of practice. School Leadership and

Management 25, no. 4: 349�/366.

McElroy, J.C. 1982. A typology of attribution leadership research. Academy of Management Review

7, no. 3: 413�/417.

McElroy, J.C. and C.B. Shrader. 1986. Attribution theories of leadership and network analysis.

Journal of Management 12, no. 3: 351�/362.

McLaughlin, M.W., and J. Talbert. 2001. Professional communities and the work of high school

teaching. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

MacNeill, N., R.F. Cavanagh, and S. Silcox. 2003. Pedagogic principal leadership. Management in

Education 17, no. 4: 14�/17.

Ogawa, R.T., and S.T. Bossert. 1995. Leadership as an organizational quality. Educational

Administration Quarterly 31, no. 2: 224�/243.

Sammons, P., S. Thomas, and P. Mortimore. 1997. Forging links: Effective schools and effective

departments. London: Paul Chapman.

Sergiovanni, T.J. 1998. Leadership as pedagogy, capital development and school effectiveness.

International Journal of Leadership in Education 1, no. 1: 37�/46.

Siskin, L.S. 1994. Realms of knowledge: Academic departments in secondary schools. Washington, DC

and London: Falmer Press.

Siskin, L.S., and J.W. Little. 1995. The subjects in question: Departmental organization and the high

school. New York and London: Teachers College Press.

Spillane, J.P. 2006. Distributed leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Spillane, J.P., R. Halverson, and J.B. Diamond. 2001. Investigating school leadership practice: A

distributed perspective. Educational Researcher 30, no. 3: 23�/28.

Storey, A. 2004. The problem of distributed leadership in schools. School Leadership and

Management 24, no. 3: 249�/265.

Timperley, H.S. 2005. Distributed leadership: Developing theory from practice. Journal of

Curriculum Studies 37, no. 4: 395�/420.

Turner, C.K. 1996. The roles and tasks of a subject head of department in secondary schools in

England and Wales: A neglected area of research? School Organization 16, no. 2: 203�/217.

*/*/*/. 2003. A critical review of research on subject leaders in secondary schools. School

Leadership and Management 23, no. 2: 209�/227.

Wallace, M. 2002. Modelling distributed leadership and management effectiveness: Primary school

senior management teams in England and Wales. School Effectiveness and School Improvement

13, no. 2: 163�/186.

Wasley, P.A. 1991. Teachers who lead: The rhetoric of reform and the realities of practice. New

York: Teachers College Press.

Wasserman, S., and K. Faust. 1994. Social network analysis: Methods and applications. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Webb, R. 2005. Leading teaching and learning in the primary school: From ‘educative leadership’

to ‘pedagogical leadership’. Educational Management Administration and Leadership 33, no. 1:

69�/91.

York-Barr, J., and K. Duke. 2004. What do we know about teacher leadership? Findings from two

decades of scholarship. Review of Educational Research 74, no. 3: 255�/316.

Yukl, G. 1999. An evaluation of conceptual weaknesses in transformational and charismatic

leadership theories. Leadership Quarterly 10, no. 2: 285�/305.

186 J.A. de Lima

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

Appendix 1: Department network questionnaire (excerpts)

Please, search for your name in the list below and tick the box space behind it. Then,

for each department colleague, please indicate the extent to which you feel that he/

she has contributed to your own professional development as a teacher, during the

current school year. To respond, please use a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 means did not

contribute at all and 5 indicates contributed totally.

Tick your name here

%

Contribution

I Antao 1 2 3 4 5

I Alina 1 2 3 4 5

I Apolo 1 2 3 4 5

I Alzira 1 2 3 4 5

I Apia 1 2 3 4 5

I Artur 1 2 3 4 5

I Aura 1 2 3 4 5

Please indicate, for each department colleague with whom you interacted for

professional purposes during the current school year, how many times you developed

the following activities jointly, on average, during a school term. If you do not

remember the exact number of times, please provide your best estimate. You don’t

need to fill in the spaces that refer to colleagues with whom you did not interact in

these types of activities.

Colleague We exchanged teaching materi-

als (worksheets, tests or similar

materials) although we did not

develop them jointly

We developed teaching

materials jointly

(worksheets, tests or

similar materials)

We planned lessons

together

Antao _____ times _____ times _____ times

Alina _____ times _____ times _____ times

Apolo _____ times _____ times _____ times

Alzira _____ times _____ times _____ times

Apia _____ times _____ times _____ times

Artur _____ times _____ times _____ times

Aura _____ times _____ times _____ times

PROFESSIONAL CONTACTS

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT AS A TEACHER


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

itat P

olitè

cnic

a de

Val

ènci

a] a

t 01:

44 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

Department networks and distributed leadership in schools

Documents

Transcript of Department networks and distributed leadership in schools