Collective efficacy, professional identity and collective leadership

This is absolutely maddening, because this process almost has nothing to do with what you know (in content terms). It is all about linking ideas. I don’t know how I am going and I have rewritten and rewritten in an attempt to get it down.

Here is a paragraph that shows some conceptual linking:

As Spillane observes {Spillane 2008a}, interactions are more important that actions in examining leadership from a distributed perspective. Leadership is, after all, relational. If there is a link between teacher professionalism and the distribution of leadership, the degree to which leadership is distributed should be related to the degree to which interactions within the organisation involve those behaviours which we have identified as demonstrating teacher professionalism.

———————-

I am working through one of Spillane’s methodology papers to try to keep a bit anchored. The logic is starting to work, I think. This is a very rough set of conceptual linkages:-

DL in schools involves the engagement of teachers in leadership activities (defined in terms of strategic thinking, ethical engagement, focus on learning and cultural memory) without necessary involvement in the hierarchy

Teacher leadership of this type is a function of professional behaviour (one can tabulate many of the accepted characteristics of professionalism against generally accepted definitions of leadership and look at Crowther on this topic)

One of the key outcomes of professionalism is high collective efficacy.

This provides a mechanism for explaining the impact the distribution of leadership on change management as CE has an established association with effective response to change.

IF THE DISTRIBUTION OF LEADERSHIP IS REALLY ASSOCIATED WITH EFFECTIVE CHANGE, WE SHOULD SEE MORE OF THESE BEHAVIOURS IN SCHOOLS THAT ARE DEALING WITH CHANGE IN AN EFFECTIVE MANNER.

You could do what Spillane did and look at activity and networking, but maybe the way forward is to look at who is exhibiting behaviours within a school. Instead of asking teachers things like, to whom to you go for advice about ‘x’, perhaps you could swing the questions to an issue of change? So, to see the degree of distribution, you would ask teachers to look at the quality of interactions. In a multisite study, this could get really interesting.

So, one could take a change instance (say, one innovation that a number of schools were dealing with – anything from interactive white boards to laptops to restorative justice). Part of the data collection could involve an evaluation of the effectiveness of the innovation. The other part would involve data collection about the level of professional behaviours in the staff. Highly effective innovation and high professional behaviours/DL = relationship between DL and effective change.

My approach differs from Harris and from Spillane because I am arguing for a set of behaviours rather than a normative organisational approach (Harris) or a role-performance approach like that of Spillane with his SSQ approach.