Exploring How Teachers Assume Leadership Roles in the Era of Accountability

Abstract

Many schools in the United States have adopted different types of distributed leadership to meet the increasing administrative and accountability demands of policy requirements. Distributed leadership places teachers in different positions based on different times and tasks, and gives them different authority to engage them in the most valuable leadership practice tasks. The federal government encourages teachers across the country to take on formal leadership roles while also retaining their classroom status. This paper explores the practice of leadership using a distributed leadership theoretical framework by exploring two case studies such as H Middle School to gain insight into how leadership is achieved by individuals’ idiosyncrasizes and the context in which they are located.