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Professional Community and Distributed Leadership

July 24, 2006

Richard Halverson explores a distributed leadership perspective on how leaders create contexts that build and support professional communities in schools. In his paper "A Distributed Leadership Perspective on How Leaders use Artifacts to Create Professional Community in Schools," Halverson argues that teachers' professional community results from coordination of social interaction through the design of structures in a situation of practice. School leaders put these structures into play to intentionally shape professional community in schools. The paper draws on several research studies on distributed leadership in urban, suburban and rural school districts to describe the range of structures leaders use to engage in school-wide reform. The paper concludes with a consideration of design principles to guide school leaders in developing useful tools for building professional communities in their schools. (PDF, 31 pages)