Distributed school leadership: Making sense of the educational infrastructure

Abstract

Distributed leadership focuses on what teachers and school leaders do together, but also on how the situation mediates that interaction. This paper focuses on the importance and function of the situational dimension of practice. By framing situational aspects in terms of local educational infrastructure, it explores organizational components in the educational infrastructure and how they condition teachers’ sensemaking about their instructional practice. Two schools in the same school district in Sweden were purposively chosen to reflect significant variation in student outcomes. Semi-structured interviews were conducted, in addition to observations of meetings. The results show that an important function of the infrastructure is to facilitate and guide teachers’ sensemaking about their instructional practice and that these processes are influenced by the clarity of the school’s vision and the principal’s use of the infrastructure for sensegiving purposes. The outcome is an argument for studying school leadership through the lens of organizational components in the educational infrastructure