Session 5

1.Distributed leadership

Q1:How are leadership and management related to school and classroom conditions and school outcomes?
To answer this question, the article reveals a framework that is a distributed perspective in school leadership and management research.

Q2:What does it mean by having a distributed perspective of leadership?
For my understanding, I think a distributed perspective of leadership is quite the opposite from the traditional view that sees leadership in schools as monopoly of individual. As a distributed perspective of leadership, different staff on different position might be transfer as leaders or advice givers, which means the focus on leadership is changing from school principals to other staff who might be in a leading position at some points. In the article, it says, it involves two aspects: one is the leader-plus aspect and the other one is the practice aspect.

Q3:Do you think that this is a "commonsense" way of conceptualizing leadership?
Before learning this session, I believe it's important to construct conceptualisation of leadership too. The reason is very simple and also confirmed from the article that if we don't make a clear conceptualisation of leadership, we won't have a methodology to do research and all work related to this field will be weakly operationalised and poorly measured.
As for my concerned, I think leadership is like the core module such as a brain on human being. Whoever is serving as a leader should be able to send the right order to lead the school for better school outcomes and also response in a proper way to avoid further damage to the school outcomes. That's why I think it's very important to conceptualize school leadership and management.

Q4:What do you think are the most important role of leadership?
This is a really hard question for me to answer based on the current study on leadership. Should it be a good advisor? a in time corrector？a objective evaluator? a far-sighted decision maker? Or maybe all of them? I would like to look back to this question after finishing all the sessions.

Q5:What is the link between leadership and school change?
There is always a believe that leadership has a positive impact on school outcomes and that is why leaders should take a great account on staff percentage. But this article is arguing about this statement because of the insufficient empirical evidence.

Q6:This paper reports on an empirical study on leadership. What is it about?
It's about study operation and measures.

Q7:What is the methodology used?
This article collects data from a midsize urban school to study the operation and measures in a distributed perspective. Also, they provide consideration about the way how these measures capture variance among schools.

2. Dimensions of scale

Robust Design
1.depth: deep and consequential change in classroom practice, altering teachers' beliefs, norms of social interaction, and pedagogical principles as entered in the curriculum.
2.sustainability: involves maintaining over substantial periods of time and consequential changes in classroom practice enabled by an innovation's depth.
3.spread: involves diffusion of the innovation to large numbers of classrooms and schools.
4.shift: districts, schools and teachers assume ownership of the innovation, deepening, sustaining, and spreading its impacts.
5.evolution(new, require depth,spread and shift to be done first): when adopters of an innovation revise it and adapt it in such a way that it is influential in reshaping the thinking of its designers.

Q: Is there a theory of change that underpins the theory of scalability put forward in this paper?

In my perspective, the four dimensions of scale are compatible with the diffusion theory. To put it into a simple word, I think the dimensions of scale is an educational practice in school's perspective of the diffusion theory.

There are four dimensions of diffusion: innovation, communication, time and social system. The first dimension of scale can be also seen as the first aspect of diffusion as adopters have to fully understand a new innovation in depth before they can carry it out.

After that comes to the sustainability, spread and shift stages, which all could be switched to communication and time phrases in diffusion theory. In innovation diffusion theory, communication means to exchange new ideas from one adopters to one or several others. On the perspective of scale, sustainability, spread and shift are all about to spread changes in a larger or wider popularity in schools. To further this progress requires time and effort which fits the time aspect in the diffusion theory.

Last, the last dimension of scale is revolution. If we go back to the system level of diffusion theory, it is the same as to form a social system. The adopters of an innovation are no longer remain as the receivers, they are shifting their accountability to be able to revise and help reshaping the ideas along with its designers.

On the other hand, I also believe that the dimensions of scale can also fit in the epidemic theory of innovation. But not in a whole scale, only for the sustainability, spread, shift and evolution parts. Because in the epidemic perspective, it provides a way to foster an innovation in a system level. Following the epidemic theory, schools can make a successful innovation in a proper way.

3.Sustainable leadership:

Seven principals:
1. it creates and preserves sustaining learning
2. it secures success over time
3. it sustains leadership of others
4. it addresses issues of social justice
5. it develops but not deplete human or material resources
6. it develops environmental diversity and capacity
7. it undertakes activist engagement with the environment

Q1: What is the meaning of sustainable leadership as used in this paper?

Sustainable leadership matters, spreads and lasts. It is more like a shared responsibility rather than continuously consuming human or financial resources. It leaves a positive impact on the educational environment. With a shared learning community, it can foster good ideas and successful practices on it's own initiative.
There are seven principals of it as above.

Q2:Are any of the three theories of change more or less compatible with the seven principals of sustainable leadership?

The ecological theory of change posts the same aspect of sustainable development in education, which is compatible with the seven principals of sustainable leadership. To make a sustainable development of a new specie, the seven principals can be a beacon to light the right direction and which I believe is the mission of leadership in education.

Key terms glossary:
1. distributed leadership:
    leader-plus aspect and practice aspect
    formal and informal leadership
2. sustainable leadership:
    seven principals
3. robust design / scalabiliity:
    depth, sustainability, spread, shift and evolution.