THE NOTION of a gifted leader of change conjuresup powerful and enduring icons. Images of found-ing fathers, presidents, CEOs, and leaders ofsweeping social reforms are institutionalized in ourcollective consciousness. The field of educationhas celebrated its share of individuals exercisingthis kind of leadership. From Horace Mann’s lead-ership of the common school movement in the1840s, through to examples of modern day schoolreformers like Deborah Meier, the educationalliterature is replete with extraordinary people ofvision and action, who have led their respectiveschools, districts or systems to achieve good re-sults for children, often despite overwhelminglydifficult circumstances.

Such cases of singular greatness in educationalleadership, compounded by remarkably endur-ing early 20th century theories about managingschools (Taylor, 1911; Bobbitt, 1913), subtly per-petuate a collective myth. This myth promotes theexpectation that the solutions to the myriad edu-cational woes found in districts and schools acrossAmerica is tightly wrapped up in finding the rightpersons to fill those formal roles at or near the topof the education hierarchy–principals, district ad-

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ministrators, superintendents—visionary changeagents who can wield formal power to bring aboutgood results.

It is a compelling story and, on rare occa-sions, it actually comes true. Yet the history ofschool reform offers a striking contrast regard-ing the efficacy of such an approach to leader-ship for widespread improvement in America’spublic schools. What history tells us is that thetraditional hierarchical model of school leader-ship, in which identified leaders in positions offormal authority make critical improvement de-cisions and then seek, through various strategies,to promote adherence to those decisions amongthose who occupy the rungs on the ladder below,has failed to adequately answer the repeated callsfor sweeping educational improvements acrossAmerican schools. While one can locate outpostsof excellence where maverick principals or super-intendents have resurrected dying schools or dis-tricts through these types of strategies, such effortsare recognizable only because they are the excep-tion not the rule. Unfortunately, even in caseswhere traditional leadership approaches havebrought about significant change, such changes

Leadership of Inquiry: Building and Sustaining Capacity for School Improvement

Michael A. CoplandUniversity of Washington

This article reports on findings from a longitudinal study of leadership in the context of a region-wideschool renewal effort entitled the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (BASRC). BASRC’s theoryof action is multifaceted, incorporating a focus on distributed leadership, continual inquiry into prac-tice, and collective decision-making at the school. Analysis of qualitative and quantitative datasources suggests the use of an inquiry process is centrally important to building capacity for schoolimprovement, and a vehicle for developing and distributing leadership. Within a sample of 16 schoolswhere reform processes are most mature, the principal’s role shifts to focus more narrowly on keypersonnel issues, framing questions and supporting inquiry processes. Findings provide evidence ofthe efficacy of policy strategies rooted in new understandings of school leadership.

Keywords: distributed leadership, inquiry, principals, school reform

Educational Evaluation and Policy AnalysisWinter 2003, Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 375–395

are prone to disintegration once the identifiedleader moves on.

This article introduces findings from a studyof a large-scale school reform effort built on anunderstanding of school leadership that runs de-cidedly counter to the prevailing myth. The BayArea School Reform Collaborative (BASRC), afive-year reform effort involving schools through-out San Francisco Bay Area region seeks to“reculture” schools in ways that support wholeschool change. BASRC formed in the spring of1995 as part of the nationwide Annenberg Chal-lenge, and subsequently became the Hewlett-Annenberg Challenge, funded jointly by Hewlettand Annenberg, which provided $50 million toBay Area public schools to be matched by publicand private funds over a five-year period. TheCollaborative established by BASRC included86 Leadership Schools, each of which receivedgrants of up to $150 per student for three to five years after completing a rigorous, evidence-based, peer-reviewed portfolio process. Leader-ship schools used these grants to fund supportservices, time for school inquiry and professionaldevelopment, and other resources in support oftheir focused reform effort.

BASRC’s theory of action for leadership inschools rests on a handful of tenets. First thetheory holds that the important work of improvingschools must be accomplished collectively bythose at the school level, and implies a change inschool culture. Importantly, BASRC designersunderstand that school reculturation rests in parton a fundamental restructuring of the roles andprocesses of school leadership. This tenet suggestsa model for leadership less dependent on the ac-tions of singular visionary individuals, but ratherone that views leadership as a set of functions orqualities shared across a much broader segment ofthe school community that encompasses adminis-trators, teachers, and other professionals and com-munity members both internal and external to theschool. Such an approach implies the need forschool communities to create and sustain broadlydistributed leadership systems, processes andcapacities.

Second, BASRC’s theory of action imaginesthat leadership for improving teaching and learn-ing is rooted in continual inquiry into work at theschool, inquiry focused on student learning, highstandards, equity, and best practices. This processof inquiry does not cease; rather, the work is best

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thought of as an ongoing effort to build greatercapacity with regard to instructional practices thatimprove learning among those who work in theschool community. People in the school renormtheir basic work around identifying, striving tosolve, and continually revisiting critical problems.

Finally, BASRC’s theory of action suggeststhat the decisions made at the school regardingidentification of critical problems, and develop-ment of solutions for same, should be made col-lectively, and focus on improving the learning ofall students. People at the school make decisionstogether to determine and manage the challengeswithin their context and sustain the work, shar-ing the school’s progress and challenges in thedistrict and broader community.

Conceptual Framework

The roots of the BASRC theory of action canbe traced from two distinct conceptual direc-tions. First, the theory of action relies on con-ceptual understandings of school leadership thatdeviate from traditional norms of hierarchy.BASRC’s theory supports an approach to lead-ership that builds on relatively recent notions ofdistribution and functional expertise. Second, thetheory of action has roots in both cognitive andsocial theories of organizational learning. In thissense, BASRC’s strategies focus both on trans-forming internal cognitive structures, as well asshaping and supporting the organizational sys-tems and structures in which actors operate inservice of improving practice.

Distributed School Leadership: Concepts and Definitions

The conceptual beginnings of distributed lead-ership trace back at least to organizational theorydeveloped in the 1960s. McGregor’s (1960) The-ory X and Y assumptions about human motiva-tion, for example, were fundamental to a wholegeneration of scholarship on educational admin-istration (e. g., Campbell, et al., 1971). McGregorsuggested that Theory X leaders view people aslazy, work avoidant, and deviously opportunistic,and so have a fundamental distrust of employees,leading to tight controls, close supervision, andheavily centralized authority with little opportu-nity for employee involvement in organizationaldecision-making. Theory Y leaders, by contrast,view people as basically honest, industrious,responsible, and willing to take initiative, and

as such are more inclined to delegate authority,share responsibility, and enable employee partici-pation in making various organizational decisions.

From Theory Y and associated human relationsperspectives followed notions about how the indi-vidual leader’s practice can transform the organi-zation not by mandate through channels of formalauthority, but by inspiring followers’ commit-ments to a greater shared purpose. The idea oftransformational leadership was first fully real-ized by Burns (1978) and was later extendedinto noneducational contexts by Bass (1987)and others. Leithwood and colleagues (Leithwood& Steinbach, 1991; Leithwood & Jantzi, 1991)applied the ideas to education, offering an under-standing of transformational leadership that focused school leaders’ attention on the use offacilitative powers to construct strong school cul-tures in which leadership is manifested throughother people, not over other people (Leithwood,1992, p. 9).

When the efforts of individual transformationalleaders are realized, many organizational actorsare made powerful in new ways. Leithwood(1992) cites Roberts (1985) who explains:

The collective action that transforming leader-ship generates empowers those who participatein the process. There is hope, there is optimism,there is energy. In essence, transforming leader-ship is a leadership that facilitates the redefini-tion of a people’s mission and vision, a renewalof their commitment, and the restructuring oftheir systems for goal accomplishment.

Initially, then, transformational leadership wasconceived as inherent to an individual, a per-son’s ability to inspire others to look beyondself-interest and focus on organizational goals.Over time, the concept took on new meanings to bemore inclusive of broad strategies that have beendescribed elsewhere as facilitative leadership(Conley & Goldman, 1994). The focus on facil-itation involves behaviors that enhance the“collective ability of a school to adapt, solveproblems, and improve performance” (Conley& Goldman, 1994).

Over time, other notable educational leadershipscholars began to signal broader understandings ofleadership. In an early treatise, Sergiovanni (1984)argued that leadership is an artifact or productof organizational culture, and that the particularshape and style of leadership in an organization isnot a function of individuals or of training pro-

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grams; rather, it has to do with the mixture of or-ganizational culture and the density of leader-ship competence among and within many actors.Sergiovanni posited a fundamental shift, discern-ing leadership less as a set of management tech-niques, and more as a set of norms, beliefs andprinciples that emerge, and to which membersgive allegiance, in an effective organization.

In a complementary vein, Murphy’s (1988)comprehensive analysis of the first decade ofinstructional leadership literature devoted con-siderable attention to analyzing problems thatemerged from a general failure in the scholarshipon that topic to consider both the micro and macrolevel contextual issues of school leadership.Murphy criticized what he viewed as errantlyplaced attributions of causality in the literature;attributions that improvements in teaching andlearning were due to the efficacy of actions per-formed by persons in formal roles of authority,rather than organizational conditions. Scholar-ship of this nature was foundational to the recentemergence of conceptual work to define distrib-uted leadership in schools.

In an important contribution, Elmore (2000)sets out a framework for understanding the recon-struction of leadership roles and functions aroundthe idea of distributed leadership in the service oflarge scale instructional improvement. A systemlevel perspective, this new way of seeing is rootedin principles of distributed expertise, mutual de-pendence, reciprocity of accountability and capac-ity, and the centrality of instructional practice.

Elmore identifies five leadership domains—policy, professional, system, school and practice—each encompassing multiple actors, and developsa robust understanding of leadership functionsassociated with each domain. In this way, Elmorepushes the field to relocate the authority and re-sponsibility for improving teaching and learn-ing, separating it from the sole control of those“up the chain” of the administrative hierarchy,and embedding that authority and responsibilityin the daily work of all those connected to the en-terprise of schooling. Elmore’s work sets the stagefor a deeper conceptual discussion of distrib-uted leadership as it applies to schools within this research effort.

First, it is clear that scholars understand that dis-tributed leadership is collective activity, focusedon collective goals, which comprises a quality orenergy that is greater than the sum of individual

actions. In a recent literature review on distrib-uted leadership, Bennett, Wise, Woods andHarvey (2003) found that conceptions of dis-tributed leadership highlight it as an emergentproperty of a group or network of interacting in-dividuals, contrasting it to conceptions of lead-ership that focus on the actions of singular indi-viduals. Complementary to this understanding,others offer the view that leadership is an orga-nizational quality, originating from many peo-ples’ personal resources, and flowing throughnetworks of roles (Pounder, Ogawa, & Adams,1995; Ogawa & Bossert, 1995).

It is apparent that leadership of this nature ismore than just the sum of individual efforts. Im-plied in the construct is a dynamism that extendsbeyond simply better articulation of divisions intask responsibility. Spillane, Halverson and Dia-mond (2000) suggest that school leadership isnecessarily a distributed activity “stretched over”people in different roles rather than neatly di-vided among them, a dynamic interaction be-tween multiple leaders (and followers) and theirsituational and social contexts. Lambert (1998)conceives of such leadership as separate fromperson, role and a discreet set of individual be-haviors. Similarly, Gronn (2002) offers a view ofdistributed leadership as comprising “concertiveaction,” suggesting that distributed leadership isimbued with the additional dynamic which is theproduct of collective activity focused on well-articulated shared goals, in contrast to a view ofdistributed leadership as “numerical or additiveaction,” which is the aggregated effect of a num-ber of individuals contributing their individualinitiative and expertise in different ways to a groupor organization.

Second, distributed leadership involves thespanning of task, responsibility, and power bound-aries between traditionally defined organiza-tional roles. Bennett et al., (2003) found in theirreview that conceptions of distributed leadershipoften signal the openness of the boundaries ofleadership. While boundary-spanning activitieshave traditionally been identified as occurringbetween an organization and its external envi-ronment (Thompson, 1967; Schreiber, 1983) orbetween innovating subsystems and the largerorganization (Tushman, 1977), it is argued herethat an aspect of distributed leadership involvesthe cultivation of internal boundary-spanningactivity. Naively simple understandings of what

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constitutes teachers or principals’ work are madeproblematic in the shift. Moreover, with distrib-uted leadership, decisions about who leads andwho follows are dictated by the task or problemsituation, not necessarily by where one sits in thehierarchy.

Efforts to engender a shift toward leadershipof this kind may create cognitive dissonance forindividuals socialized in traditional school bu-reaucracies. For principals trained in top-downapproaches to leading schools, for example, thedistribution of leadership is likely to necessitate arelinquishing of some control to enable others toassume new power. As Leithwood (1992, p. 8)notes, in discussing the loss of top-down control,“one cannot do away with this form of powerwithout losing one’s share. It is a zero sumgame.” Further, for those system actors who findthemselves in newly created, boundary-spanningpositions, this shift involves renegotiation of insti-tutionalized role relationships. Teachers who as-sume new leadership responsibilities, for example,may feel some ambiguity about being enveloped in school-wide controversies from which they arenormally buffered (Smylie & Brownlee-Conyers,1992), or end up isolated from or ostracized bycolleagues who view them differently as a resultof the change (Lieberman, 1988; Katzenmeyer& Moller, 2001).

A third aspect of a conceptual definition is thatdistributed leadership rests on a base of expertrather than hierarchical authority. Related to de-construction of role boundaries is the idea thatnumerous, distinct, germane perspectives andcapabilities can be found in individuals spreadthroughout the organization. Bennett, et al. (2003)found that conceptions of distributed leadershipinvolve recognizing expertise rather than formalposition as the basis of leadership authority ingroups. This conception implies a rather differentorganizational power base than is typically under-stood inside schools. Instead of primarily center-ing on the principal, the expert knowledge andskills necessary to exercise leadership for the improvement of teaching and learning resideswithin the larger professional community, or“community of practice” (Wenger, 1998). Many,rather than few, have a share of responsibility forthe shared purpose, a view of leadership requiringthe redistribution of power and authority towardthose who hold expertise, and not necessarilyprivileging those with formal titles.

Such a view of leadership has considerablewarrant as a basis for instilling organizationalchange in schools. As Berman & McLaughlin(1978) pointed out in their landmark study, top-down change, even when it is voluntary, routinelybreaks down at the point of implementation.Moreover, the history of school reform shows usthat strategies for improving teaching and learn-ing fundamentally succeed or fail in the inter-action between teachers and students behind theclassroom door. Leadership built from expertisebroadly exercised in service of consensual goalsoffers, at least in theory, a more promising chancefor instructional innovation to take root in schoolsthan does a “chain of command” approach to im-plementing change. The work that education pro-fessionals accomplish in changing their own, andeach others’ instructional practice for the betterconstitutes the most important and powerfulleadership action in schools and school systems.Such a view answers the oft-debated question ofwhether principals need to be outstanding teach-ers, suggesting that those in formal positions ofleadership are required to possess rigorous in-structional knowledge and skill in order to exer-cise expert power. Further, the collective andregular exercise of this power across classroomsin a school offers strong evidence of distributedleadership as it is conceived here.

Scholarly work on leadership distribution is notconfined strictly to the theoretical realm. Empir-ical evidence is also surfacing in support of thenotion that, within successful school communi-ties, the capacity to lead is not principal-centricby necessity, but rather embedded in variousorganizational contexts. McLaughlin & Talbert(2001), for example, examined organizationalcontext effects on teacher community, teachingand teachers’ careers and found no instances ofadministrative leaders who created extraordinarycontexts for teaching by virtue of their own uniquevision; nor did the study reveal any common pat-terns in strong principals’ personal characteris-tics. Successful principals were men and womenwith varied professional backgrounds who workedin collaboration with teacher leaders and in re-spect of teaching culture. They found variousways to support teachers in getting the job done.The leadership of these principals was not su-perhuman; rather, it grew from a strong and sim-ple commitment to making the school work fortheir students, and to building teachers’ commit-

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ment and capacity to pursue this collective goal.Perhaps most importantly, the responsibility forsustaining school improvement was shared amonga much broader group of school community mem-bers, rather than owned primarily by formal lead-ers at the top of the organizational chart.

Building Communities of Practice through the Cycle of Inquiry

For distributed leadership as defined above totake root and succeed in schools, at least three im-portant organizational preconditions are implied,all of which require considerable work, and addconsiderable depth to an understanding of the con-struct. First, the definition advanced above impliesthe development of a culture within the school thatembodies collaboration, trust, professional learn-ing, and reciprocal accountability. Leadershipdistributed in the manner defined above demandsa culture in which people work together in a col-laborative, trusting manner; where, as Resnick &Glennan (2001) note, “principals are accountableto teachers in the same way that teachers are ac-countable to students. . . . (and) where teachershave professional learning opportunities providedand expected in their schools.”

Establishing this kind of culture is easier saidthan done. The distribution of leadership along thelines mentioned above doesn’t happen throughsome waving of a magic wand; rather it must begrown in the organization over time, and probablynecessarily instigated by transformational, facili-tative individual leaders seeking to build strong,powerful school cultures. What Sarason notedin 1971 still holds true for many schools today:school cultures are complicated and often frac-tious; principals and teachers are relatively iso-lated in their positions; and teachers responsiblefor student learning often have little time to learnnew educational ideas. Sarason (1971) stressedthat changing a school culture is difficult work andmust be done in a comprehensive way if it is to beeffective and of lasting significance. Distributedleadership as conceptually defined here requirescollaboration, trust, and time and attention to pro-fessional learning if it is to take root.

Second, such a view of distributed leadershipimplies a need for strong consensus regardingthe important problems facing the organization.Absent a clear notion of what constitutes the im-portant problems for focus, leadership work canbecome dissipated and undirected. Moreover,

reaching consensus is rarely a straightforwardtask, and requires processes to help all system ac-tors deeply understand the nature of the problemsthey face. This can occur only through the col-lection and analysis of data that routinely shedslight on progress toward the fundamental goalsof improving teaching and learning, and in regu-lar professional dialogue about that progress.

Finally, the conceptual definition of distributedleadership also implies a need for rich expertisewith approaches to improving teaching and learn-ing among all those working in the school, inclu-sive of role. If distributed leadership is most cen-trally manifested in the direct interaction betweenprofessionals with expert instructional ability andstudents, this requires all who work with childrenin any way to engage in the development of thenecessary professional knowledge, skills and atti-tudes to consistently deliver on that promise.

Wenger theorizes that within organizations, asparticipants engage in the pursuit of shared en-terprises, learning results in practices that reflectboth the pursuit of the enterprise, as well as theattendant social relations. Over time, these prac-tices become the property of a kind of commu-nity created by the sustained pursuit of a sharedenterprise—a community of practice (Wenger,1998, pg. 45). Wenger’s theory encompassesboth cognitive and social aspects. The essenceof the “Cycle of Inquiry” strategy employed byBASRC can be understood as an effort to embedstructures and processes at the level of the schoolthat promote the sustained pursuit of shared enterprise—namely, improving student learning–through work that is at once the province of groupsand individuals.

BASRC’s design for reform understands thatschool improvement necessarily requires culturalchange and recognizes individual change as a nec-essary prerequisite to a change in culture. Such anapproach is partly analogous, on the one hand,to cognitive theories of organizational learning(Anderson, 1983; Hutchins, 1995) that view learn-ing as created via individuals’ processing andtransmission of information through communi-cation, explanation, recombination, contrast, in-ference, and problem-solving (Wenger, 1998).BASRC’s approach also suggests that for indi-vidual change to collectively add up to culturalchange, structures and processes are required tohelp define and shape the work of the collectiveon particular areas of identified need. This no-

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tion is supported by theories of organizationallearning that focus on the ways individuals learnin contexts, and with the ways in which organiza-tions themselves “learn” (Argyris & Schon, 1978;Senge, 1990; Brown, 1991; Brown & Duguid,1991). Such theories focus in part on the infu-sion of organizational systems or structures thatpromote and grow institutional memory.

The cycle of inquiry intended to help schoolspose, investigate, and respond to questions aboutpolicies and practices and has six steps (See Fig-ure 1). The first two steps have to do with select-ing and narrowing a question for investigation.The next step is to identify measurable goals. Thisstep recognizes that setting specified targets asmeasures for success is critical in determining thesuccess or failure of an action. The fourth and fifthsteps include creating and implementing a partic-ular action—connecting knowing and doing. Thesixth step is to collect and analyze results fromdata generated by the action taken.

Finally, the cycle connects back to the first stepas the problem for focus is refined in light of newevidence. Simply put, BASRC’s cycle of inquirystrategy aims to inform schools about the degreeto which they are actually accomplishing whatthey think they should be in terms of a focused re-form effort and consequences for students. Im-portantly, in defining and revisiting a focused ef-fort, members of the school community are notjust recipients of someone else’s vision for whatimportant work is to be done. Rather, they are anintegral part of creating this understanding. The-oretically, this process of inquiry gives voice andmerit to the views of parents, teachers, young-sters, and administrators in the development, im-plementation, communication, and evaluation ofa focused effort that defines the school’s mostimportant work. Taken together, the steps in thecycle can be understood as a structural/systemsintervention akin others found in the literature onorganizational learning (e.g., Senge, et al., 2000)and rooted in organizational theory.

The BASRC initiative also attends to the learn-ing skills teachers will need in order to carry outa cycle of inquiry. In an effort to foster teachers’capacity and comfort in generating knowledge ofpractice, teachers receive ongoing professionaldevelopment in asking questions and under-standing problems, in developing accountabilityframeworks to guide cycles of inquiry, and inconstructing standards against which to measure

their school’s progress in their focused reformeffort. Furthermore, the initiative provides op-portunities for practice and continual attention tothese skills, so that they may eventually becomea regular part of teachers’ professional repertoire.

BASRC’s inquiry strategy then, is conceivedto promote growth in all three organizational pre-conditions necessary for distributed leadership,as defined earlier, to flourish. BASRC seeks to:(a) promote cultural change; (b) develop consen-sus and clarity about the problems schools face,and (c) build professionals’ instructional exper-tise to enable them to teach more children moreeffectively.

This article reports on a longitudinal study ofleadership in BASRC schools.

The research has explored several questions todate:

• How is BASRC’s inquiry-based theory ofaction enacted? How do preconditions supportingleadership distribution develop in context, if at all?

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• Within schools identified as “leaders” inbuilding leadership capacity, what evidence canbe found to suggest leadership distribution isoccurring?

• What are leverage points or strategies forpromoting and building broadly distributed lead-ership capacity within a school community?

• What, if anything, happens to leadershipfunctions typically associated with the princi-pal’s role within schools intentionally attempt-ing to broaden and share responsibility for lead-ership? What functions remain crucial to asuccessful principalship?

• What are the challenges to promoting dis-tributed leadership?

The balance of this article presents a synthesisof the research to date in exploring these questions.

Sample and Method

The research reported here reflects two distinctphases of a larger study of the BASRC initiative.

FIGURE 1. Cycle of Inquiry (2001): The engine of BASRC’s theory of school change.

Phase 1 incorporates findings from a survey ofprincipals conducted across all BASRC Leader-ship Schools, as well as survey data collectedfrom a sample of Leadership School teachers.Observational data from BASRC-sponsored re-gional principal gatherings were collected andanalyzed, as were various school-level docu-ments related to the reform work. Phase 1 also in-corporates qualitative research focused on theuse of the BASRC inquiry process in LeadershipSchools. In Phase 2, sixteen Leadership Schoolswere targeted for closer study of leadership issues.Schools within this purposive sample were eitherrecommended by BASRC personnel or identifiedby members of the research team as potentiallyrich examples of schools with more advanced re-form efforts, as evidenced by their use of inquiryto inform and improve practice. The sample in-cluded four high schools, eleven elementaryschools, and one K-8 school. With one excep-tion, all schools were members of the first or sec-ond BASRC cohorts of Leadership Schools.1

The schools varied broadly in terms of socioeco-nomic status, ethnicity of student population, andschool size. The focused research effort withinthe identified schools involved analysis of a se-ries of interviews conducted with principals andteacher leaders serving in newly created roles asbuilding-level BASRC reform coordinators, andobservations conducted by the research team atthe school sites.

Enactment of BASRC’s Inquiry-BasedTheory of Action

First among the research interests was to assessthe extent to which elements of BASRC’s leader-ship theory of action as defined above was enactedacross the pool of BASRC Leadership Schools.Findings from two different surveys conducted inthe spring of 1998, one with BASRC LeadershipSchool principals and the other with teachers in asample of BASRC schools, provide evidencethat shared leadership was emerging across theseschools.

Principal Survey Results

A retrospective survey of principals withinBASRC Leadership Schools attributed positivechanges in the development of teachers’ leadershipcapacity to schools’ involvement with BASRC(N = 63 principals). Teachers’ leadership capacitywas defined by a series of measures that assessed

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principals’ perceptions of the extent to whichteachers have voice in school decisions related toinstructional change and improvement, the ex-tent to which teachers share a consensus aboutthe particular areas in need of change at theschool and associated learning outcomes, as wellas the extent to which the nature of staff discus-sions changed to focus on issues of teaching andlearning through involvement with BASRC.

The principal survey revealed that 91% of theLeadership School principals agreed or stronglyagreed that their school’s BASRC involvementwas instrumental in changing teacher leadership,while 97% noted agreement that BASRC involve-ment promoted teachers’ consensus on neededareas for whole school change (see Table 1).Ninety-two percent of surveyed principals sug-gested that the use of data for decision-makinghad moderately or substantially increased as a re-sult of the school’s involvement with BASRC.Sixty-five percent agreed or strongly agreed thattheir teachers are engaged in systematic analysisof student performance data. Fully 95% of sur-veyed principals indicated either agreement orstrong agreement that their school’s BASRC in-volvement has promoted staff discussions ofteaching and learning, and 71% indicated thatBASRC work has promoted teachers’ voice inschool decision-making.

Leadership School principals also are positivein their assessment of BASRC’s role in promotingleadership activity among other stakeholders inthe school community. Seventy percent of princi-pals surveyed agree or strongly agree that theirschool’s involvement with BASRC has promotedparent voice in school decisions. Seventy percentalso indicate agreement that BASRC involvementhas promoted interaction between different stake-holder groups (e. g., classified staff, teachers, par-ents, community, and district administration).

Teacher Survey Results

Teachers in a sample of 18 diverse BASRCLeadership and Membership Schools2 respondedto survey questions about conditions of leader-ship in their school, providing additional indica-tors of leadership capacity in the set of schoolsfor which we have both teachers and principalsurvey data. The questions focused on the use ofthe cycle of inquiry, presence of a school-widevision, broad encouragement of reform work, useof data in making school decisions, and the

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TABLE 1Principal Survey Responses on Development of Leadership Capacity, (N=63)

Question: Indicate your level of agreement that BASRC involvementhas changed the following Strongly Stronglyat your school: disagree* Disagree* Neutral* Agree* agree*

Teachers’ voice in school decisions 0 0 29 53 18

Parent voice in school decisions 0 0 30 55 15

Teacher’s consensus on desiredlearning outcomes 0 0 10 53 37

Teacher’s consensus on neededareas for whole school change 0 0 3 52 45

Teacher leadership 0 0 9 47 44

Staff discussion of teachingand learning 0 0 5 49 46

Interaction between differentstakeholder groups 0 0 30 57 13

Big Some No Some BigDecrease* Decrease* Change* Increase* Increase*

Q: How has BASRC involvementchanged your school’s use ofdata as basis for decision-making? 0 0 8 50 42

Note. *In percent.

TABLE 2Correlation of Teacher and Principal Responses to Questions of Leadership Capacity

Principal questions (N = 63)

Are teachers engaged Do teachers regularlyin analysis of examine school

Teacher questions (n = 27) student data? performance?

Use of data for decisions? .26 .54*

Use of cycle of inquiry? .53* .63**

School has a vision for reform? .60** .60**

School encourages inquiry? .53** .60**

Progress is examined? .60** .51*

Teachers collect data? .52* .62**

School makes changes for student needs? .57* .63*

Note. *p < .05, **p < .01.

responsiveness of the school as a whole to mak-ing changes intended to address student needs.

Teacher responses correlated significantly withresponses made by principals to questions ofteacher engagement in data analysis and in thegeneral examination of school performance (seeTable 2). Teachers’ responses about the use of thecycle of inquiry, use of data in decision-making,presence of a shared school-wide vision of re-

form, school-wide encouragement of inquiry, andschool responsiveness to making changes basedon student needs were all strongly positively cor-related with principal responses to a question re-garding the extent of teachers’ regular examina-tion of school performance. Teachers’ responsesabout their level of involvement in data collec-tion, the examination of progress at the school,the school’s encouragement of inquiry, and the

presence of a school-wide vision of reform allcorrelated strongly with principal responses to aquestion about the level of teachers’ engagementin analysis of student data.

Strong corresponding evidence of the devel-opment of distributed leadership across BASRCschools surfaced through analysis of qualitativedata obtained through interviews and observa-tions on site. Sharing the work of leadership inthe context of whole school reform is viewed asa necessity, as illustrated by this comment froman elementary principal:

Every (staff) person has some form of leader-ship role because there’s not enough time in theworld to do all the leadership things that need tobe done. So . . . we have grade-level leaders,and during our grade-level meetings, these peo-ple take a leadership role in making sure that theagendas are organized and that the work thatneeds to be done in a grade level is maintained.And then we have content leaders in science,technology, mathematics, as well as literacyand social science. There are many differentleadership roles that function across the school.How do they come about? Well, basically, outof need and . . . It’s just kind of the culture now.(Principals know) we can’t be involved in allthe decisions because there’s not enough time,so we really have to disaggregate the jobs andkind of fit them where they go.

The Development of Inquiry

Despite this relatively strong agreement amongteachers and principals about the efficacy of elements of the BASRC reform, the way thatthe strategies unfolded varied greatly across the86 leadership schools. In particular, schools em-

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braced the Cycle of Inquiry from varying startingpoints, and they reached differing levels of so-phistication in their work at the conclusion of thestudy. Considerable variation was noted in levelsof trust and commitment within teacher commu-nities, and in schools’ readiness and experience inworking with data. Schools with a reform history,for example those who had participated in an ear-lier California school reform initiative (SB 1274),had the advantage of building on their prior reformprogress and knowledge of whole-school reformpractices. They also tended to be farther along inestablishing cultural norms, expectations for im-proving practices school-wide, and connections toresources in the region to support their work.

Across the broader sample of LeadershipSchools, an analysis of patterns of inquiry practicethat had developed within the schools over timerevealed notable differences. Comparing patternsacross schools, researchers identified the qualita-tive differences that distinguish more and less ad-vanced inquiry practice and suggest developmen-tal stages of inquiry-based reform (see Table 3).Importantly, while the categorical descriptionsthat follow appear static for purposes of differen-tiating schools by their inquiry practices at a pointin time, evidence of schools making progressfrom one category to another was found over thecourse of the study. For example, at the end ofyear two, evaluators reported that many teachersacross leadership schools were asking themselves“What’s data?”3 Yet by the end of year four, ananalysis of a representative sample of 40 schools’“Review of Progress” documents, which summa-rized their progress to that point, indicated thatthree fourths of schools were engaged in dis-aggregating student achievement data to examine

TABLE 3School Stages of Inquiry

Stage Defining characteristic

Novice

Intermediate

Advanced

Note. Drawn from BASRC Evaluation, Phase 1, Center for Research on the Context of Teaching, Stanford University.

• Learning the value of data and learning, and struggling with, how to use data• Experimenting with the inquiry process and becoming comfortable with procedures• Valuing and using data; trying to seek out the best data; sometimes struggling with how to do so

• Inquiry process shifts closer to teaching and learning; may require changing directions to getclose to core concerns of the school; “competency traps” possible if school become complacent

• Managing data is no longer a struggle but instead the norm for making decisions

• The inquiry process is an accepted, iterative process involving the whole school and connectedto the classroom level

• Actively pursuing sustainability of the reform

racial/ethnic disparities in student achievement.4

At the end of Year 4, 37 of 86 Leadership schools(43%) demonstrated to peer reviewers that theywere consistently using multiple cycles of inquiryat several levels–classrooms, departments, gradelevels, and school-wide–to examine school andclassroom practices.5 Moreover, central to quali-tative differences across the Leadership schoolswas whether individual schools developed con-sensus around a focused problem or problems thatguided their efforts, made use of multiple sourcesof data, created systems for conducting inquiry,and developed ways to sustain their work.

Novice

Leadership Schools in the novice range strug-gled to develop problem statements specificenough to articulate the school’s concerns andhad difficulty aligning BASRC expectations totheir own needs. Their hesitancy and desire to“do it right” expended a great deal of energywhile not accomplishing much. As a reform co-ordinator in one elementary school explained,“The questions that we were trying to form . . . re-ally just were not helpful. We were getting caughton things like, ‘[BASRC says that] one questionis supposed to be about school structures and thisone’s supposed to be about students.’ ” In anotherelementary still in the novice range of inquiry de-velopment, the principal explained, “We were al-ways inquiring, but we’re inquiring perhaps notin as systematic a way as we could with everyperson in the school being a part of the inquiry.”Another principal acknowledged, “Just havingthe (inquiry) process is not enough . . . What I seethat doesn’t happen here is the deep level ofanalysis that results in change. What’s the goodof having analysis if it doesn’t then drive somedecision making?”

Teachers in novice-range schools remaineddaunted by the process of collecting and analyzingdata and did not trust that their data collectionefforts would be useful to inform their practice.Often schools did not have the information theywanted about student performance or school cli-mate, or needed to develop systems for gatheringdata, including developing school-wide assess-ments and surveys. Once they were collected,the sheer amount of data often overwhelmednovice schools. One reform leader explained, “I have suitcases of data—literally. That’s howI move it from meeting to meeting.” School peo-

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ple often did not know how to move from col-lecting data to using data as evidence to examineteacher practice. One reason that these schoolssometimes were paralyzed by data was that teach-ers were anxious about what the data might show.The data could reveal that a school was slidingbackwards rather than moving forwards. It couldshow that one teacher’s class was not progressingas quickly as others. Engaging in such risky workrequired trust within the teacher community.

Intermediate

In contrast, schools in the intermediate rangewere able to develop a level of comfort with workthrough the Cycle of Inquiry and were buoyed bysmall improvements they connected with their inquiry-based reform. These positive indicators ofreform progress served to increase teachers’ com-mitment to their focused effort, and developedconfidence in their ability to engage in inquirypractices. Teachers in these schools began to un-derstand how data analysis could potentially im-prove their practice, and data increasingly becamea resource for staff discussions about studentachievement and evidence. Reflecting on thepotential benefits of using data, one high schoolteacher in an intermediate-range school said:“Data in and of itself isn’t useful. It’s what you dowith it. Before, we had data. Probably we couldhave guessed that a lot of those things were thecase. But once you formalize it, that implies thatyou have to do something.”

As schools became more sophisticated in theircycles of inquiry, qualitative data were incorpo-rated to balance data from the SAT-9 test, Cali-fornia’s standardized assessment, which teachersfound increasingly inadequate for measuringstudent learning or minutely diagnosing studentneeds around their focused efforts. One highschool teacher explained, “I would like to see theschool move toward qualitative data . . . [to] pro-vide some in-depth understanding of who ourstudents are.” Despite recognizing its potentialusefulness, intermediate schools struggled withhow to analyze such data in a rigorous manner.As a result, qualitative data were seen as less validor merely “anecdotal” when compared with otherdata sources. One high school teacher worried:

I think a lot of the data tends to be anecdotal . . .but I think in a situation like this a lot of it hasto be. Teachers know what feels right andwhat’s working in their classrooms and what is

making their jobs more fulfilling and what ishelping their students move forward . . . And Idon’t know how to collect hard data on that.

Some schools at this stage tended to rush to-ward a solution without first understanding the na-ture of their students’ academic gaps, particularlywhen facing external pressures to improve per-formance or insufficient time to carefully reflectthrough their inquiry cycles. Rather than usingdata to develop strategies collaboratively, theseschools tended to slip back into the more commonreform process of choosing a strategy without firstdefining their problem. High staff turnover causedlearning communities to lose their inquiry focusand return to old habits. For example, a highschool administrator in a school experiencing highteacher turnover (30% in one year), commentedthat some teacher inquiry groups at his schoolwere choosing a strategy before defining a prob-lem. Administrators and reform coordinator real-ized that they needed to re-train their staff aboutthe inquiry process to reorient the school towardsidentifying student needs first before changing andrefining their instruction.

In some cases, intermediate-range schoolsfailed to advance further on inquiry practicesbecause initial successes they experienced ledto “competency traps” (Levitt & March, 1988).In these cases, schools became complacent withthe work they were accomplishing and were notcompelled to deepen their inquiry and makestronger connections between inquiry practicesand teaching and learning. Such schools came tobelieve they could “do” the Cycle of Inquiry fordiscrete purposes, conceptualizing the process asa concrete, short-term utilization of a BASRCtool rather than as an ongoing, more fundamen-tal change in the way the school functioned.

Advanced

In more advanced schools, staff successfullymoved beyond a focus on how to “do” inquiry to-ward an emphasis on the content of their inquirycycles. One reform leader explained the changein focus,

There’s a very fundamental difference in wherewe were at the beginning of last year. We werevery much like, ‘Oh, no! What’s our QuestionA? What’s our Question B?’ And now we’re re-ally starting to talk much more about teacherpractice and really just trying not to get caughtup in the terminology of Question A and B and

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what that’s supposed to be all about. But thatwas a really long process.

More advanced schools understood their in-quiry processes as fundamental to determininghow to help students achieve and the kinds of re-sources they would need to continue to achievetheir goals. Teachers in schools at the advancedrange became more demanding consumers ofsupport as they carefully considered the resourcesthey needed beyond school walls. Moreover,teacher communities in advanced schools createdknowledge within the school site, becoming morereliant on their own professional community asthe source for generating new practices and in-venting ideas for reform. External resources werestill employed in professional development activ-ities, but for specific technical issues, such astraining on a specific instructional technique thatfilled a need identified through the school’s in-quiry practices.

At schools in the advanced range of inquiry,teacher communities engaged multiple-level in-quiry cycles that were mutually enforcing and ex-plicitly addressed connections and gaps across theschool system, classroom practice, and studentoutcomes. At one advanced school, for example,staff development days focused on examiningwhich students were not meeting grade-levelbenchmarks in literacy and identifying systemsand structures that supported or impeded teachers’ability to conduct classroom-level cycles of in-quiry. At the classroom level, teachers targeted asmall group of students to identify effective teach-ing strategies that impacted student performanceon the school’s literacy performance standards.By connecting this classroom Cycle of Inquiryback to the whole-school Cycle of Inquiry,teachers shared practices that were accomplish-ing results for students among the entire schoolcommunity and refined school-wide structuresto better support teachers’ classroom practice.

Importantly, inquiry processes conducted atthe level of the whole school add meaning toclassroom-based inquiry. One more advancedschool experienced with action research prior toinvolvement with BASRC quickly saw how thisclassroom-based research needed to be situated inschool-level inquiry if it were to add up to coher-ent knowledge for school decision making. Theprincipal points directly to the strategic relation-ship between these two forms of evidence:

Whatever’s happening in the classroom that ateacher is doing in terms of action research . . .has to be linked to overall school goals. Be-cause one of the dangers of doing action re-search is you can have a whole bunch of teach-ers doing that kind of work and it will lookclassroom-by-classroom real specific. How-ever, if they don’t have any relationship to eachother and there’s no relationship to overallschool goals, the value of it will have very dif-ferent kinds of results. And also what we find isthat for action research you need some people tobe involved in some common problem-solvingissues [part of the cycle of inquiry]. If there’s noone doing something in common, there’s no-body to help you debrief and talk deeply aboutwhat you might be doing.

As schools’ experiences with inquiry reveals,cultural change takes time and continual effort.Novice-range schools tended to stagnate and im-plement routines that satisfied BASRC require-ments. These schools followed the six-step Cycleof Inquiry, often without implicating classroompractice at all. Sometimes hesitant to break normsof teacher isolation and hierarchical leadership,novice-range schools treated completion of a cycleas a compliance exercise. Yet, in schools thatprogressed to the intermediate range or beyond,teachers grew to collectively value the principlesof inquiry. They learned to exploit the cycle’s po-tential to exert their collective leadership in deal-ing with challenging problems within theirschools, as one teacher described:

Just from the point of comparison, in past expe-riences when teachers got together and talked . . .they talked about problems. They were very re-active, addressing problems after they’ve hap-pened in the school. And [now with] thesegroups, they’re proactive. We’re trying to makethings happen as opposed to addressing some-thing after it’s happened.

The transition from inquiry as procedure to in-quiry as stance signals a cultural shift, from teach-ers simply “going through the motions” of anotherreform project, to a realization of their own col-lective power to improving teaching and learningin the school.

In more advanced schools, the Cycle of In-quiry process matured into an accepted, iterativeprocess of data collection, analysis, reflection, andchange. More advanced schools appear to be wellalong the path toward functioning as learning

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communities, recultured in the way BASRC’stheory of change envisioned, and themselves con-stitute teachers’ essential site and source of learn-ing. The whole school is both the site of inquiryand the focus for change; efforts to improveteaching and learning involve most of the faculty,not just a smaller group of reformers. Discourseabout students’ standards-based achievement andexpectations about evidence are commonplacerather than exceptional. Leadership for changecomes from within the school, growing out ofthe inquiry process. Teachers’ new knowledgeabout how students do across groups and acrossgrades appears to enable them to see ways in whichthey need to improve, and the kinds of resourcesthey need to begin making those improvements.Teachers in such schools demonstrate increasingclarity and specificity in terms of what their schoolneeds by way of knowledge resources from theoutside, and in what form they should be pro-vided. Knowledge of their practice appears tohave made them more powerful as consumers.

Leadership Leverage Points, Strategies and The Principal’s Role

In-depth study of 16 Leadership Schools re-veals more about the question of how schoolsmade progress toward the cultural shifts signaledabove, and highlights leverage points and strate-gies that emerged within schools. While not rep-resentative of the entire collection of Leadershipschools, this field-based phase of the study pro-vided an opportunity to delve deeper into theinner workings of reform within schools identi-fied as “leaders” within the larger group of 86Leadership Schools. With regard to their use ofinquiry, all sixteen schools were recognized as either intermediate or advanced on the rubric notedin Table 3. Within these schools, the Cycle be-came a critical component to developing vision,giving credence to shared leadership structures,and constructing a culture of data that de-centersvisioning, planning, decision-making, and ac-countability away from individuals in traditionalleadership roles (e.g., school administrators) andseeks to involve and incorporate the broaderschool community (e.g., teachers, parents, andat the secondary level, students). The use of aninquiry-based approach builds a common vo-cabulary, enables articulation of the one or twokey issues that the school aims to address, and isa key vehicle for building distributed leadership

for improving teaching and learning. Fundamen-tally, the second phase of the study wonderedabout how these schools came to be this way.

Not surprisingly, findings suggest, first, thatformal leaders (principals and teacher leadersserving in the newly created role of reform co-ordinator) often provide the catalyst for changeearly in a school’s reform work. Second, newleadership structures have emerged in these re-forming schools to promote broader involvementin the work of reform, and the structures are mostsecure in schools with a long reform history. Finally, as schools advanced in the reform, theprincipal’s role necessarily changes in key waysto enable the reform efforts to deepen and grow.

Leaders in Formal Roles Provide a Catalystfor Change Early in Reform Work

Intentional formal leadership, vested in the roleof the principal and/or BASRC reform coordina-tor, initially puts reform on the school’s agenda soit cannot be ignored. As suggested earlier, dis-tributed leadership cannot be created out of thinair. Persons in formal leadership roles are highlyimportant in this sense, providing a catalyst forthe work early on, and serving notice that the re-form effort and associated changes in profession-als’ work at the school is not merely anotherchange fad that will quickly pass. For example,one principal from the sample noted:

There’s no substitute for the principal of a schoolshowing that this is what matters . . . I think in theabsence of that, people just kind of tend to brushit off as one more thing on their too-full plate.

Of crucial importance within most of the sam-pled schools is the presence of the reform coordi-nator. In virtually all cases, BASRC LeadershipSchools used a portion of grant funds to hire a co-ordinator whose primary responsibility focuses onthe reform effort. This person is most often a class-room teacher freed from teaching responsibilities,and in fewer cases a classified employee or hiredmember of the community (a parent, for example),who oversees the reform work, and acts as a liai-son with BASRC. Schools decide how to use thisresource; some reform coordinators function inthe role full-time, while others have teaching oradministrative responsibilities assigned as part oftheir workday. Early on in the process, the work ofreform often brings a huge new workload, andwithout the reform coordinator to handle this extra

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work, much of it would logically fall on the shoul-ders of the principal, a role already overtaxed inmost schools.

However, negotiating this new role creates aset of challenges for the persons who occupy it.For example, one reform coordinator illustratesthe difficulty of figuring out her place in the or-ganization that as yet lacked structures and sup-ports for sharing leadership:

The change process can be a very painful thing.I think in my first year of doing (the job of re-form coordinator) there were a lot of growingpains of figuring out how to take the negativefeedback about all the work, and all the time,and to figure out my role in it . . . being both ateacher and then in this other role that is seen Ithink, at times, as quasi-administrative. So,walking that line is definitely a challenge.

This comment highlights some of the inherentdifficulties that emerged for teachers assuming thenew role of reform coordinator—negotiating theboundaries for their authority, and the potentialdisruptions this creates in the previous leadershipstructure at the school.

New Leadership Structures Emerge to Support Reform

Across the sample of Leadership Schools stud-ied in depth, several new leadership structureshave developed or have been reinforced throughBASRC work. Examples include organizationalschemes featuring: a rotating lead teacher insteadof a principal; two co-principals; principal/reformcoordinator partnerships; and, inter-school leader-ship structures and strategies. Findings suggestthat these new leadership structures are linked withdeveloping school culture that supports inquiry-based change.

Rotating Lead Teacher

One new structure examined in this research isthe rotating lead teacher. The lead teacher assumesmost leadership functions typically associatedwith the principalship, but stays in the positiononly for a predetermined term. In a K-8 school in-cluded in the sample, the lead teacher holds thisformal position for a period of up to three years,and then rotates back into a faculty teaching posi-tion, while another member of the faculty steps into assume the role of “leader.” Sharing service ina formal role enables many teachers on the faculty

to develop a system view of the school, includingthe interface of the school’s change efforts withthe district, and sustaining the school’s valued,shared, ongoing work of reform. Such an arrange-ment builds capacity within the faculty, and worksin favor of sustaining reform. A teacher who for-merly served in the role of lead teacher spokeabout the perceived merits of this leadership struc-ture at the school:

Usually (the lead) teachers come up through theleadership organization in the school. Peoplehave already recognized that person as a leaderand as a person who knows the direction of theschool, has some wisdom, and we have confi-dence in. And, beyond that, is a leader in theschool. Almost always that person has been partof the leadership team for three years or more,and so has taken part in professional develop-ment, and we’ve already called on their exper-tise. So I think they go in first as being valuedfrom the staff as a leader.

Co-principals

Another novel leadership structure featurestwo co-principals. In a similar manner to whatCourt (1998) describes, the co-principals spreadthe responsibility for leadership functions acrosstwo individuals rather than centering all the workon one person’s shoulders. This structure appearsto allow the formal leaders greater flexibility infocusing and coordinating their available time,together with other personnel resources in theschool, on the work of reform. Two co-principals,Sam and Sally, discuss leadership at their schoolthis way:

Sally: Sam and I really share the principalship inthat we’re both experienced principals, so eitherone of us can do anything here at the school, it’sjust a matter of what comes up on the calendar.We’ve divided up the (supervision of) newteachers, and grade levels. We both deal withdiscipline, we both (work with) school site coun-cil. In terms of professional development, weboth work with the leadership team. We havea reform coordinator that is a classified (non-certificated) position, and (that person) coordi-nates all our reports and all our technical kinds ofthings. (The reform coordinator) makes all thecontacts and does all the nitty-gritty stuff. Wejust do head stuff.

Sam: We have a leadership team that is repre-sentative across the grade levels. All of the con-versations (around) planning, (about) work on

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the (BASRC) review of progress, happen withthose people on release days, working with us. Inaddition, we have different inquiry studies hap-pening throughout the school with groups ofteachers all focusing on literacy and reading,each with different questions related to our dataand things we want to find out.

Reform Coordinator

Sally and Sam’s exchange also highlights thecrucial importance of principal-reform coordi-nator partnerships, which are among the mostcommon new leadership structures in BASRCLeadership Schools. As noted earlier, enrichedfunding provided schools with the opportunityto hire reform-coordinators who function insupport of reform work, providing leadershipthrough oversight, planning, organization, andhands on work with teachers in classrooms fo-cused on goals for school-wide change. In thebest of cases, these reform-coordinators functionin concert with the building principal, bearing thebrunt of much of the “grunt work” inherent inschool reform, while also playing a key role insupporting and sustaining the work.

Design Studio

Some emerging inter-school leadership struc-tures and strategies for promoting the develop-ment of professional community within, and between, schools are evident in the data. One par-ticularly interesting strategy, called the “designstudio,” is a process whereby a host school im-mersed in the development of some best practice,or set of practices, invites other schools to visit,and opens its work up for scrutiny and sharing.Visiting schools use their visit as an opportunity tolearn and design for their own school based onwhat they observe, and to ask questions of those atthe hosting site. A high school reform coordinatorin a school employing the design studio conceptexpresses the benefits of this leadership structure:

The key principle that most (visiting) peoplekeep leaving with is that school is a profes-sional community. The Design Studio reallymodels what it’s like to be a professional learn-ing community; people get a sense of what it’slike to be part of one right in a school. (The De-sign Studio) is facilitated by teachers, not by ad-ministrators and principals. They’re part of it,but they’re not the main show. And it’s appar-ent there’s a lot of ownership in the school

(among) the people who work there. Designstudio says, “There are some things we’re reallyproud of, we want to show you, we think it canbe helpful for you. (And) there are also lots ofthings we’re working on, you can help us thinkthrough too.”

Findings suggest that broad-based leadershipstructures are linked with a school culture thatsupports reform work. To illustrate, one schoolemphasizes that constantly getting new peopleinvolved in leadership roles and attending con-ferences has helped them to gain a shared feelingthat the reform work is “integral” to everythingthey do. One principal expressed that she feltthose norms had developed in her school:

What we’ve created in the work is the kind ofpassion for the work that pushes people ratherthan the (teacher union) contract pushing thework . . . And so because that’s systemicallythere, they’re going to think differently abouthow they lead, how they teach, what responsi-bilities they’re willing to take.

Reform Experience Builds DistributedLeadership Within the School Community

Schools exhibiting the deepest and broadestleadership distribution generally had sustainedhistories of reform work, in many cases predat-ing their involvement with BASRC. These alsotend to be schools that are engaged in multiple re-form agendas in addition to their participation inBASRC. In these schools, the distribution ofleadership involves increasing participation ofnew faces who tackle new functions, and workfrom different vantage points in the school.

In schools with longer reform trajectories, indi-vidual classroom teachers assume greater leader-ship for reform by communicating the school’s fo-cused effort routinely and directly to parents. Asthe most trusted professional in the school fromthe parents’ perspective, the classroom teacher op-erates from a unique vantage point in terms of theability to communicate school-wide goals to par-ents, and to translate those goals into meaningfullanguage connected to classroom work done bystudents. These conversations occur in a variety offormats which range from individual one-on-onediscussions between teachers and parents, to aseries of public accountability events required aspart of BASRC membership, where evidenceabout student achievement is presented to the

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parent community. Regarding this process, oneteacher said:

The accountability events have really been fab-ulous for us. I mean, I think we’ve had four ofthem now, and each one has been really in-sightful. And I think parents have truly enjoyedand learned a lot (from these events). We’veshared the hard data with them. We’ve shownthem we’re doing a great job for some kids andnot for others . . . we’re not doing as well fornarrowing the gap for our African-Americankids and Latino students, and we’ve been veryclear about it and asking (parents) how theythink they can help, both for their own studentsand then for other students.

An elementary principal in a school with a lengthyreform history articulated the key leadership roleplayed by classroom teachers this way:

It all comes back to the fact that teachers havesuch a commitment to developing relationshipswith their (students’) parents. There’s a lot oftrust. And we also do a pretty good job aboutletting people know what we don’t know, toothrough our conversations. Again, what hap-pens, is . . . its not what the SCHOOL says ordoes . . . the power is in the relationship be-tween the teacher and the parent. And if theteachers are on board and really understand,then that is communicated in every drop anddrip of conversation.

Many BASRC schools have leadership teamsin place that include administrators, teachers,classified staff members, parents and, in somecases, at the secondary level, students. Early on inreform efforts, teams typically function as sound-ing boards for the principal, but evidence sug-gests that this conception changes with extendedtime and effort. To illustrate, in one school withinthe sample of sixteen, the leadership team has be-come a group primarily concerned with framingproblems, and delegating problem solving toother groups within the school:

The leadership team has changed now to be in-stead of a problem-solving team, it’s more of ateam that sorts issues and . . . helps expeditewhat’s the best way to deal with an issue.

In another school, the reform coordinator sharedhow a systems approach to accountability hashelped keep their focused effort in view, saying,

(The work will) sustain as long as there’s thissort of system in place; that there’s a leadership

team that’s interested in all the committees, cre-ating goals, reflecting on those goals, and alwaysasking themselves at a broader level, “Is thiscommittee’s work tied to our focused effort?”

In schools with greater longevity in the work ofreform, evidence exists of principals and teacherssharing a support function—encouraging, nour-ishing, bolstering and reminding others within theschool community of the shared vision and val-ues that serve as motivation for the work of re-form. In these schools the provision of supportand encouragement takes place beyond formalrole-bound rituals (e.g., typical supervision andevaluation processes); day-to-day work is im-bued with a spirit of support and encouragementof progress that is shared broadly within theprofessional community. One principal com-mented on the relational benefits of engaging inreform work:

I think the biggest benefit is in the area of rela-tionships. Relational situations tend to makeyour work either good or bad. Bottom line. AndI think that for my staff as well as myself, therelationships that we have developed have beennothing but beneficial.

The Principal’s Role

In distributing leadership functions, the role ofthe principal necessarily changes, and yet remainscrucially important in the work of reform. Severalstrong themes emerged from the data in this re-gard. Principals who have been successful in pro-moting shared leadership perform key functionsthat protect the vision for the school’s reformwork, and in some cases, act as a buffer betweendistrict and school. In addition, principals inschools where shared leadership has taken holdappear to exert less role-based authority, opting in-stead to engage in framing questions and prob-lems, and provide space and support for inquiry tooccur. For many principals this involves a processof renegotiating their “old” authority, and allow-ing others to step forward to handle importantleadership duties. This is not to suggest that prin-cipals in successfully reforming schools instanta-neously let go of large chunks of responsibility,and that others magically step in to fill the void.Rather, the expansion and sharing of leadershipdevelops within reforming schools where princi-pals view teaching colleagues as professionalequals, and intentionally and steadily seek to in-clude others in the work of change.

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Principals Perform Key Personnel FunctionsThat Protect the Vision for Reform

Principals have the authority to hire and firestaff to protect the vision of a core group forbroadening and deepening leadership without an“anti-reform” group becoming a barrier. Theyalso play a necessary role as a buffer betweendistrict and school, protecting the work initiatedat the school site, particularly in cases where thework conflicts with other priorities. One elemen-tary principal within the sample of 16 illustrated:

We have had some teachers join our staff whodidn’t share our vision after the fact. And I’mtelling you the staffing is what makes or breaksanything. So we had some rigmarole aroundpersonnel and I have dismissed (teachers), orpeople would say coerced . . . talked into leav-ing. Other people are asked to leave.

A high school principal pointed to his responsibil-ity for personnel, and specifically, for hiring theright people, as a tremendously important contri-bution to sustaining the effort:

I think that my biggest contributions are thepeople that we’ve brought in the last two years.Because those are the people that really stir itup in a positive way—because there are peoplewho stir it up negatively—but they stir it uppositively. And so I think that as they empowerthemselves it’s going to continue to be a posi-tive force.

Principals Frame Questions and Support Inquiry

Principals in the 16 sampled schools appear tobe moving away from leadership that rests on for-mal role authority in the district hierarchy, to prac-tice that is more aptly reframed as leadership ofinquiry. Principals who are successful in broaden-ing leadership typically are not those who exerciseauthority by telling others what to do. Rather,these principals are engaged in asking questions,exploring data, and engaging faculty and thebroader community in questions that can move theschool forward. Moreover, they create ongoing,regular time and space for this to occur. In somecases, this means principals have to be willing tolet go of leadership functions traditionally asso-ciated with the role. To illustrate, one elemen-tary principal noted that the leadership team atthe school:

. . . Organized and completed the Review ofProgress (ROP) process virtually without (the

principal’s) participation” and went on to extolthe shared commitment to the process exhibitedby her staff.

In another elementary school, the principal cre-ated a daily one and one half hour block of timespecifically devoted to staff development throughinquiry, processes primarily organized and carriedout by teachers.

Where the principal relinquishes control, teach-ers move beyond typical advisory roles by neces-sity. To illustrate, in one high school, an ad hocteam of teachers has come together to prepare aschedule of presentations of best practices byteachers and staff for their colleagues. In a middleschool, teachers are leading the community selec-tion process of their next principal. And, in anotherhigh school, department heads are leading the wayin curriculum, working to change their own prac-tices as a group and their ability to articulate whattheir goals are and why they are important beforedialoguing with the rest of their staff.

However, in some cases, turnover in key posi-tions has pushed some teachers into unfamiliarroles. One teacher shared her experience of, “try-ing to help the people we’re working with, but atthe same time we don’t have all the answers.”We see an apparent paradigm shift that accom-panies teachers hearing their own voice withinreform work. This shift moves from the tradi-tional view that it is not the teacher’s role to getthe big picture, placing the responsibility forcrafting and sustaining a vision with the admin-istration, to a norm where teachers are expectedto be leaders, and work through their own cyclesof inquiry within the classroom to inform thebroader whole school cycle. Data suggest thatthis is not an easy shift to make while engaged inthe work. Some schools still point to their site ad-ministrators as the key persons “in charge of” re-form and call upon them to “lead the effort.”

Reframing the Principalship Doesn’t Mean“Letting Go” of Everything

This research effort does not lead to the con-clusion that the principal’s role is doomed to ex-tinction at any point in the near future. On thecontrary, many of the key functions outlined inliterature and played out in practice still are partof what the principal must accomplish, even in asystem where leadership is shared more broadly.Within the sample of sixteen Leadership Schools,principals continue to play prominent roles as cat-

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alysts for change, protectors of vision, and lead-ers of inquiry. These elements specifically relateback to functions of leadership embedded inconceptions of principal as instructional leader,participative leader, and transformational leadernoted earlier. Yet the process of engenderingshared leadership does require principals to let goin new and important ways. One principal, whojoined a reforming high school quite far along inits work, put it this way:

The planning team here is a strong leadershipgroup compared to what I was used to in otherschools. I mean, I’m used to having strong lead-ers, but usually it’s not a cadre, it’s not a largegroup. It may be isolated individuals workingwithin their own area, but I think this is school-wide. (That affects the principal’s leadershiprole in that) you have to give up ego and powerand any illusion that you can say anything aboutanything. And that’s okay.

Important as well, is the notion that principal lead-ership can and should change over time. Throughthis work, the nature of a principal’s leadership canbe understood as much more situational or contextdependent than a static definition will allow. Forschools well along in developing a culture thatsupports shared leadership, such as those includedin the sample of sixteen, principals can becomeone important member of a “community of lead-ers” as Barth (1990) suggests. In such a situation,the rest of the community would in all likelihood,not tolerate a principal attempting to exercise anauthoritarian style of leadership; a principal per-sisting in this manner would ruin the work of re-form. However, for schools at the beginning of animprovement journey, principals may need to bemuch more active in catalyzing the work, estab-lishing the vision, and developing strategies forbuilding leadership capacity within others.

Challenges to Distributing Leadership for Instructional Improvement

This research provides evidence that BASRChas helped to develop leadership capacity withinits funded schools and documents how this capac-ity develops within schools. The in-depth casestudies also highlight challenges that remain forschools engaged in this reform effort. These chal-lenges include recognizing that structural changealone is not sufficient to broaden leadership, andthat structures require people with skills to carryout the work. Thus, while thoughtful preparation

for turnover in key leadership positions is cru-cial to the sustainability of school reform lead-ership, this occurred in only a limited number ofthe schools we studied in depth. Further, externalstresses create barriers to the development ofbroader leadership. All schools sit within broaderdistrict and state contexts that often created de-mands for change which competed for attentionwith the BASRC effort. Finally, sustaining the re-form through key formal leadership transitions re-quires planning, and poses a threat to the reform,particularly in early stages.

Structural Changes Alone are Not Enough to Distribute Leadership

Creating new structures to support changes atschool can provide a means for building leader-ship capacity, but the ability to keep key peoplein those structures is equally important. Turnoverof key leaders, both principals and teachers,make sustainability difficult, and preparation forleadership turnover receives limited attention.Of all the challenges involved in reform work,schools point to leadership turnover as the mostdisabling factor in the support and encouragementof reform. One reform coordinator we spoke withtalked about the tension of being handed differ-ent functions by the new principal. She noted,“We’re not sustainable, we have (had) 4 newprincipals. I used to (handle) curriculum instruc-tion, (and) I’m not ready to hand this off yet.”When some teachers or administrators are askedwhat would happen if key leaders left the school,they react with worry that reform as it now existswill not continue. In one example, when a prin-cipal was asked what would happen if he and thereform coordinator left, he said:

We have a couple (teachers) who would try tokeep it going, but there would not be a big push,and then it would stop . . . But my honest thingis if (the reform coordinator) and I did not comeback on January 3, by March if you came in youprobably wouldn’t know what the focused ef-fort was. It would be . . . If you asked them,“Well, we used to do that when they were here.”

Teachers Face Competing Reform Demands

The weight and breadth of whole school re-form can be considerable, and one middle schoolteacher described the move by teachers to focusinward as “paring back” and “pruning.” An ele-mentary school reform coordinator noted that a

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multitude of new initiatives in the school, addedon top of the BASRC effort, were a major con-textual challenge:

We had class size reduction, we had new stan-dards, we had the SAT-9, we had the API (Aca-demic Performance Index) and it has just turnedup the heat . . . managing the feelings of stressand overwhelmed-ness that teachers’ experienceI think is one of the biggest challenges of thiswork. . . . It is hard for teachers to hold onto theirsuccesses and so we are working hard this yearto make it more explicit and visible to teachersthat our data is showing a trend towards improv-ing student performance. But it is hard for teach-ers to hold on to that because they are in thetrenches thinking about “What am I going toteach tomorrow?” (In addition) the state tookaway our staff development days and so you aredealing with “Learn more and learn it faster—with no time.” That leads to a real sense of crushfor people, I think.

With so many competing interests and stresses,many teachers and schools shift their attention toaddress anxieties they can resolve. To illustrate,in one year round school, reflection and the track-ing of progress are challenged by irregular breaks.A teacher noted,

It’s this anxiety about ‘Are we moving fastenough’? Are we doing things fast enough? Sohaving so much time between meetings whenwe can dialogue as a staff and actually do thosegroup decision-making activities is a frustrationto me.

Many teachers’ attention remains focused largelyon their work within the classroom as they seekto understand their particular role within reformbefore engaging in inquiry around the broaderfocused efforts at their sites.

Sustainability and Preparation for Formal Leadership Transitions

Reforming schools faced the challenge of sus-taining the culture changes that support inquiryparticularly as the first phase of the reform effortdrew to a close. Becoming sustainable meantschools needed to find ways to embed their re-form work, and especially their inquiry process,into the culture of the school. An elementaryprincipal explained:

The key word is ‘embedded.’ It’s how we willdo business. It’s not a matter of it being done tous. It’s who we are and what we do.

Key leadership transition or turnover creates achallenge to sustainability for schools engaged inreform work. However, schools in which person-nel have a shared vision work to sustain the re-form by preparing for the transition, and hiringpeople into leadership positions who share thatvision. In one school, the leadership team, in con-junction with several teacher-led teams focusedon particular issues, led the selection process oftheir new principal. They were careful to ensurethat the applicant’s vision matched their own, andas a result, their work continued forward. A prin-cipal, new to a high school entering its third yearof reform, pointed out the importance of staff in-volvement in the selection process:

I think the interview process probably was veryhelpful in ensuring they (the staff) had a candi-date . . . they had selected someone who matchedthe school. And so I think already there was anawareness on my part and the staff’s part that I was in alignment with what the school wasdoing. And I know there was concern about“Who are we going to get? And what if they’renot on board?” I think the staff did a very goodjob of that, and I was aware that (the reform ef-fort) was a big issue.

It should be noted, however, that an under-standing of the importance of preparing forleadership transition appears to remain more theexception than the rule within the identifiedschools. Attention to this issue endures as a keychallenge for schools attempting to sustain thework of reform.

Conclusion

Findings from this study of San Francisco BayArea schools engaged in reform provide evidenceof the efficacy of a policy strategy rooted in a newunderstanding of school leadership. Key withinthat understanding is the notion that the distri-bution and sharing of leadership, built throughshared inquiry into improving student learning,provides a policy direction for moving beyondnarrow role-based strategies that have definedschool leadership for decades. BASRC Leader-ship Schools’ experiences suggest that the distri-bution of leadership functions across a school,given adequate time and personnel to handle thetasks, can provide the capacity, coherence andownership necessary to sustain and deepen re-forms. Perhaps most significantly, this researchprovides initial evidence of the power of inquiry

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as the engine to enable the distribution of leader-ship, and the glue that binds a school communitytogether in common work. Given that role-basedleadership strategies have been essentially unableto meet the complex challenges associated withschool change, this research calls for a new lookacross all roles within school systems with a mis-sion to distribute and sustain the functions of lead-ership within the broader school community.

Notes1 Cohort 1 and Cohort 2 schools were funded be-

tween Spring 1996 and Spring 1997.2 Teacher survey included a total of twenty-seven

teachers from within the eighteen schools.3 Center for Research on the Context of Teaching.

(1998). Year two: Assessing results. Evaluation Re-port. Stanford, CA: Author.

4 Center for Research on the Context of Teaching.(2000). Year four: Assessing results. Evaluation Re-port. Stanford, CA: Author.

5 Ibid, p. 17.

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Author

MICHAEL A. COPLAND is Assistant Professor,University of Washington, College of Education, MillerHall, M205, Seattle, WA 98195-3600; mcopland@u.washington.edu. His areas of specialization are educa-tional leadership and policy studies.

Manuscript Received November 15, 2002Revision Received November 24, 2003

Accepted November 24, 2003