Video: A new view: distributed leadership
HGSE Professor John Diamond

Distributed leadership in the definitive perspective is not a type of leadership. It's not a model of leadership. It's not a style of leadership. It is not something that you place on top of a school and say, "Now you're doing distributed leadership."

What distributed leadership is, again, is a conceptual frame to help us understand leadership practice in a way that we can sort of build on our practice and think deeply about what we're doing in leadership positions in the context of schools. Leadership activity is the focus.

So we're not focusing on the person or people who lead. We're not focusing just on the context of that leadership. We're focused on the activity. Leadership activity might be something like trying to sell a vision in the context of the school, or trying to transform the instruction of practice in particular classrooms within the school.

Think about the distributed perspective as an outflow of work and activity theory and distributed cognition. So when you think activity theory, I think that one of the best ways to get at that is to think about how an activity system works. And the activity system really is a combination of the whole cockpit. Try to think about the activity of manning the plane, not as something that an individual person does, not as something that the instrumental panels would do without the people, not as something a pilot would do without the air traffic controller.

And that's what we mean by thinking about leadership activity rather than the people and artifacts only. What distributed cognition suggests is that people's thinking and action don't happen in a vacuum. They're tied in with the interactions with other people. They're tied in with the context of the environment. These are what we consider the constituting elements of leadership practice from a distributed perspective.

So you think about the situation, leaders, and teachers. And we argue that leadership activity happens through the interaction of these multiple players. One of the things that happens when we study leadership, oftentimes think about leadership by sort of focusing on individual people. One of the things that happens is people talk about the fact that leadership looks to be fragmentary or crisis-oriented because you're looking at the individual person day-to-day, moment-to-moment and trying to think about, "Okay, what does leadership look like?"

Well, it looks like, "I have to deal with"-- you know, "talk with this parent about an issue with the child. And I have to answer the phone. And I have to fill out this paperwork. Then I have to do these other things." One of the things that we're trying to do with this perspective is to think about how we can understand leadership practice in more complex ways and look at the interconnections across different kinds of activities in schools.

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