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Developing Distributed Leadership
This is a one-year design grant to support the development of a program of research to focus on leadership as a distributed practice in MSPs. The goal will be to design a research program that focuses on
  1. distributed leadership practices that enable knowledge creation and innovation in MSPs and
  2. provide empirical evidence about how distributed leadership changes the practices of school districts, higher education institutions and community organizations committed to improving mathematics and science learning.

In addition, the project will identify existing tools and instruments that can be used to study distributed leadership, design a framework for developing new tools, and begin a preliminary testing of those tools with a select group of urban schools. The focus during the design work will be on high schools as they interact with the other institutions.

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Project Contributions

Schoolhouse Teacher Educators: Structuring Beginning Teachers' Opportunities to Learn About Instruction
"While few would disagree that a key component of educating teachers to teach happens on the job, research rarely explores the schoolhouse as a site for teacher education. This study…
Data in Practice: Conceptualizing the Data-Based Decision-Making Phenomena
"'Data use' and 'data-based decision making' are increasingly popular mantras in public policy discourses and texts. Policy makers place tremendous faith in the power of data to transform practice, but…
The Distributed Leadership Studies: A case study of research in and for school practice
Posted by: James Spillane . "Over the last decade, researchers in The Distributed Leadership Studies (DLS) at Northwestern University have been developing a framework for examining school leadership and management with an emphasis on their relations to classroom instruction…"
Days of their lives: A mixed-methods, descriptive analysis of the men and women at work in the principal's office
Posted by: James Spillane . This study examines the work of US school principals from the perspective of their workday using a distributed perspective to frame the investigation. Using data on 38 school principals in…
The Practice of Leading and Managing: The Distribution of Responsibility for Leadership and Management in the Schoolhouse
"In this paper, we take a distributed perspective to examine how the work of leading and managing the schoolhouse is distributed across people...
Pilot Study of Experience Sampling Methodology
April 19 - 23 marked a week of pilot study on experience sampling methodology of school principal leadership activities. A team of Northwestern University researchers tested a handheld device-based survey...
Distribued Leadership website
Posted by: Emily Benz. Please refer to this site for general information on the Distributed Leadership Study including links to past papers and presentations.