WCER Working Paper No. 2006-4
WCER Working Paper No. 2006-4
Richard Halverson
August 2006, 19 pp.
ABSTRACT: This paper explores a distributed leadership perspective on how leaders create contexts that build and support professional communities in schools. It is argued that professional community results from intentional coordination of social interaction among teachers through the design of structures in a situation of practice. School leaders put these structures, or artifacts, into play to intentionally shape professional community in schools. The paper draws on three research studies on distributed leadership in urban, suburban, and rural school districts to describe the range of artifacts used by leaders to engage in school-wide reform. The main contribution of the paper is a typology of artifacts used by school leaders to get change started, maintain change, and coherently link change efforts with other initiatives in schools.
keywords: School Leadership; Distributed Leadership; Professional Community
