Conceptualizing School Leaders as Organizers of Systems and Resources

This study examined distributed leadership at a school that underwent transformation over a ten-year period beginning in 2014. Building on theory, we focused on capacity building as a key construct in distributed leadership, connecting it to the vision for school transformation and to the distribution of responsibilities outside central administration. We explored how this vision was enacted within the mathematics department, aiming to understand how educators translate theoretical notions of distributed leadership into a site-specific vision at the department level. We developed a leadership model with three interlocking components: visioning and revisioning, building capacity, and exercising autonomy with accountability. Using four protocols, we conducted 27 interviews with 19 participants, analyzing to generate themes. Initial visioning encountered implementation tensions, prompting revisioning around four tenets. The vision of a less hierarchical decision-making process entailed creating a teacher leader position, whose responsibilities included leading curriculum development and instructional reform. Administrators described their struggles letting go of key aspects of decision-making. The study contributes theoretically by tracing the bi-directional path from vision to capacity building to accountable autonomy; normatively, by capturing the EPO’s iterative, developmental nature of distributed leadership; and empirically, by documenting stakeholder perceptions of its enactment within one department.