Distributed Leadership in Chilean Schools: Promoting Collaboration, Shifting Power Relations

• In Event: 43.047 - Leveraging Research to Advance Educational Justice in Latin America

Abstract

Purpose and perspective

Since 2005, Chile has undertaken important efforts to strengthen principals’ leadership capacity to mobilize change and improvement in schools. This has increased the demands over the principal’s role (Weinstein & Muñoz, 2013). Several studies suggest that a distributed approach to leadership helps to accommodate the multiple demands that principals face (Ahumada, 2010; Spillane, Halverson, & Diamond, 2004). For instance, Spillane and colleagues (2008) highlight the importance of formal and informal leaders in schools, shifting the focus from individual leaders to the leadership practices exercised by the school community. A distributed perspective of leadership fosters collaborative and trustful relationships, which are counterintuitive in a market-based education system like Chile’s (Carrasco & Fromm, 2016).

This paper presents an ongoing action-research project focused on increasing distributed leadership practices in public schools serving students in challenging contexts. From the experience of the first six months of the project, three topics have emerged: 1) how schools define their action-research focus 2) how action-research teams organize themselves in each school; and 3) how schools differ in their relationship with the university-based research partner.

Methodology

This project is being implemented throughout 2018 and involves the participation of 20 public schools, 17 elementary and three high schools, located across nine municipalities in central Chile. An online questionnaire that evaluates the perceived gap between the current and desired situation of distributed leadership practices and the type of leadership distribution (Maureira, 2016) was applied to teachers and leaders to obtain a baseline of distributed leadership practices. Then, each school formed an action-research team with leaders, teachers and a university-based researcher. Together they are developing a project based on a three-stage model to build distributed leadership capacity (Harris, 2014). The stages are: implementation, where teams establish a research focus, collecting and analyzing data about a problem they want to solve; innovation where teams collectively define and implement solutions to their problem; and impact, where teams assess their actions and outcomes. The university-based researchers compile field reports after each meeting with the action research team, following a simple template of questions and an integrative report at the end of five months.

Results and significance

Based on the field reports, preliminary results indicate that deciding on the research focus is a task that requires developing leadership capacity to produce evidence from different actors (inside and outside schools) in a collaborative and trustful manner. Power relationships among school leaders and teachers affect the way in which they relate to each other in action-research teams, and how they engage with the university-based researchers.

As distributed leadership practices are strengthened among different actors of the school by implementing joint actions, the micro-politics of each school are affected, generating a culture oriented towards collaboration and trust.
Similarly, participation in this project has compelled university-based researchers to continuously change their role and power position, coming in and out of the “expert” position in order to better serve the research focus of each school, shifting the power relationship between schools and the university.

Authors

• Luis Ahumada, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso

• Álvaro González, Universidad de O'Higgins

• Mauricio Pino-Yancovic, Universidad de Chile, Centro de Investigación Avanzada en Educación (CIAE)

• Oscar Maureira