Distributed Leadership Practices and Applications in Education Management: A Current Architecture for Educational Leadership, A theoretical Overview

Distributed leadership has become one of the most current architecture in education management. A review of literature reveals broadness in the manor and potential it has brought about in school improvement. While the concept of distributed leadership is regarded to be the most favoured normative model of education management, the understanding of its practices in education leadership discourse is still broad and contested. Distributed leadership entered the leadership and organisational theory discourse and clearly appealed to various scholars, policy makers and administrators and practitioners as a key leadership strategy to frame and promote their operations. Over the past years, distributed leadership has framed theoretical, empirical, and development work for education leadership. Despite frequently expressed reservations concerning its fundamental theoretical weakness, distributed leadership has grown to become the preferred leadership concept and has acquired an axiomatic status. The authors take a contemporary look at distributed leadership in practice by examining literature on the existing knowledge, theories and concepts focusing on distributed leadership in the education landscape. The authors draw upon a wide range of research literature to explore the available empirical evidence about distributed leadership and organisational outcomes. The authors address some common misconceptions that are associated with the concept of distributed leadership, how it can benefit the management of education institutions to improve the quality of teaching and learning and highlights future developments of distributed leadership. The authors argue that the distributed perspective in school leadership offer a new and important theoretical lens through which leadership practice can be reconfigured and reconceptualised. Hopefully, this article serves as a useful contribution to the on-going research and development work on school leadership to enhance the quality of teaching and learning from a distributed perspective.