(5) Shared leadership
The school leader is also a learner attending professional development, is friendly and
facilitative in sharing leadership, power and authority through giving staff decisionmaking
input (Hord, 1997). The school leader can share responsibility for improvement
with teachers by providing a structure where collaboration is well-defined. Roschelle
(1992) framed collaboration as an exercise in convergence or construction of shared
meanings and notes that research on conversational analysis has identified features of
interactions that enable participants to reach convergence through the construction,
monitoring and repairing of shared knowledge.
Roosevelt had a shared leadership structure. The school leaders enrolled and
entrusted a group of teachers to study the professional learning community process
and help the staff learn this process through job embedded training. The administrator
and select group of teachers formed a data-team (Allison et al., 2010) to provide
research-based professional learning community best practices. The results of the
practice were then disseminated to teachers working in professional learning communities.
Teachers were empowered through data collection and collective job-embedded inquiry on
student achievement and pedagogical improvement. The convergence and construction
of shared student data focussed on teaching and learning improvement created a quality
structure where innovative practice was accepted collectively.
Jefferson and Washington had no shared leadership structure, policies or procedures.
Washington had a culture of distrust, a lack of openness to improvement and a focus on
teacher accountability. There were no opportunity for teachers to influence professional
learning community structure and there was no job-embedded inquiry on student
achievement. Even though each school used the same professional learning community
model as Roosevelt, the lack of teacher focus on collective inquiry on student achievement
was a visible characteristic at each school.