Facilitating change in schools requires the leadership, time, and skills of a number of educators in the school community. While the principal usually initiates change activities such as implementing a new program or initiative or reform, the planning and the daily monitoring of the implementation becomes the purview of teams of school personnel.…

This article explores contextual factors that influenced teacher leadership behavior during the evolution of a dual language education program for elementary English-language learners. Teachers' narratives provide evidence of the relative strength of school leadership streams, that is, relationships, moral purpose, and commitment to action.…

This qualitative case study utilized distributed leadership theory and Capobianco and Feldman's (2006) conceptualization of conditions for collaborative action research (CAR) to describe the implementation of CAR as professional development (PD) and school improvement strategy in two educational contexts, one alternative school and one rural, in a…

This qualitative case study examined school leaders' roles, perceptions, and challenges leading a one-to-one (1:1) laptop initiative in a coeducational, independent middle, and high school in the United States. The findings revealed how the school leaders led the school's 1:1 laptop initiative through collaborative, yet differentiated roles and…

A cross-case analysis of five case studies of team-based technology leadership in middle schools with laptop programs identifies systems of practice that organize teams' distributed leadership. These cases suggest that successfully implementing a complex improvement effort warrants a team-based leadership approach, especially for an improvement…

In this school-university partnership, university faculty team with high school teachers to advance content literacy for immigrant students. Using a narrative research design, we retell stories, chronologically structured by comentoring developmental phases, to retrace our individual teams' activities. With a distributive perspective of…

True faculty empowerment involves decision participation, authority over issues concerning professional life, and opportunities to acquire knowledge necessary to warrant such activity. This paper describes selected experiences of four schools implementing a shared governance model, identifying factors facilitating meaningful involvement and…

An 18-month qualitative study documented the implementation of a shared-leadership environment in an elementary school. Data from faculty and the leadership team indicated positive perceptions concerning collaboration and the development of an atmosphere of open communication, although respondents expressed disappointment with the level of…

Focuses on behaviors and activities of three high school principals as they respond to district's decision to implement a shared decision-making model designed to give teachers and parents a larger voice. Describes these administrators' varying responses, along with varied ways democratic leadership was multilaterally defined in each school by…