Investigating School Leadership Practice : A Distributed Perspective

uted through the environments’ material and cultural artifacts and through other people in collaborative efforts to complete complex tasks (Latour, 1987; Pea, 1993). For example, Hutchins (1995a) documents how the task of landing a plane can be best understood through investigating a unit of analysis that includes the pilot, the manufactured tools, and the social context. In this case, the tools and social context are not merely “aides” to the pilot’s cognition but rather essential features of a composite. Similarly, tools such as calculators enable students to complete computational tasks in ways that would be distinctly different if the calculators were absent (Pea, 1993). In these cases, cognitive activity is “stretched over” actors and artifacts. Hence, human activity is best understood by considering both artifacts and actors together through cycles of task completion because the artifacts and actors are essentially intertwined in action contexts (Lave, 1988). In addition to material tools, action is distributed across language, theories of action, and interpretive schema, providing the “mediational means” that enable and transform intelligent social activity (Brown & Duguid, 1991; Leont’ev, 1975, 1981; Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1991). These material and cultural artifacts form identifiable aspects of the “sociocultural” context as products of particular social and cultural situations (Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1991). Actors develop common understandings and draw on cultural, social, and historical norms in order to think and act. Thus, even when a particular cognitive task is undertaken by an individual apparently in solo, the individual relies on a variety of sociocultural artifacts such as computational methods and language that are social in origin (Wertsch, 1991). HowWhile there is an expansive literature about what school structures, programs, and processes are necessary for instructional change, we know less about how these changes are undertaken or enacted by school leaders in their daily work. To study school leadership we must attend to leadership practice rather than chiefly or exclusively to school structures, programs, and designs. An in-depth analysis of the practice of school leaders is necessary to render an account of how school leadership works. Knowing what leaders do is one thing, but without a rich understanding of how and why they do it, our understanding of leadership is incomplete. To do that, it is insufficient to simply observe school leadership in action and generate thick descriptions of the observed practice. We need to observe from within a conceptual framework. In our opinion, the prevailing framework of individual agency, focused on positional leaders such as principals, is inadequate because leadership is not just a function of what these leaders know and do. Hence, our intent in this paper is to frame an exploration of how leaders think and act by developing a distributed perspective on leadership practice. The Distributed Leadership Study, a study we are currently conducting in Chicago, uses the distributed framework outlined in this paper to frame a program of research that examines the practice of leadership in urban elementary schools working to change mathematics, science, and literacy instruction (see http://www.letus.org/ dls/index.htm). This 4-year longitudinal study, funded by the National Science Foundation and the Spencer Foundation, is designed to make the “black box” of leadership practice more transparent through an in-depth analysis of leadership practice. This research identifies the tasks, actors, actions, and interactions of school leadership as they unfold together in the daily life of schools. The research program involves in-depth observations and interviews with formal and informal leaders and classroom teachers as well as a social network analysis in schools in the Chicago metropolitan area. We outline the distributed framework below, beginning with a brief review of the theoretical underpinnings for this work—distributed cognition and activity theory—which we then use to re-approach the subject of leadership practice. Next we develop our distributed theory of leadership around four ideas: leadership tasks and functions, task enactment, social distribution of task enactment, and situational distribution of task enactment. Our central argument is that school leadership is best understood as a distributed practice, stretched over the school’s social and situational contexts.