Milwaukee Library

Distributed Leadership: What's All the Hoopla?

Abstract

"Below, I take up this question: What is distributed leadership? The short answer
is that it depends; it depends on what one reads and with whom one talks. My intention
is not to offer the "one best" definition of distributed leadership. Rather, I describe how I
have come to understand distributed leadership, based on a five-year research project in
elementary schools in Chicago...
The paper is
organized like this: I begin with a brief overview of the distributed leadership
perspective, introducing and defining key terms and ideas. The main section of the paper
unpacks these ideas in three sub-sections -- leaders, followers, and situation. The final
section takes up the uses and miss-uses of distributed leadership."