Sonja Sentočnik Re-thinking School Leadership

The idea of distributed leadership has gained scholarly recognition as a perspective that can help generate insight into school leadership practice as it increasingly manifests in schools, and as a strategy that can potentially leverage instructional improvement. This book sheds light on how distributed leadership actually developed in two high schools in a former socialist country of Southeast/Central Europe. By revealing what it takes to make purposeful distribution of leadership (un)successful in the extant context of top-down, managerial educational system, this book will help principals, teachers, providers of professional development, and policy makers to gain deeper understanding of the changes in relations, behavior patterns, structures, and tasks required for a transition to a more democratic form of leadership. The book is illuminating for the countries with the national curriculum and associated assessment system as it alerts to the misalignment of the requirement for greater autonomy of schools that is conducive to leadership distribution, and the restricting power of the prescribed curriculum and assessment system that reduce principal and teacher autonomy.