Exploring teachers’ perceptions of distributed leadership practices in selected secondary schools within Gauteng Province

M.Ed. (Educational Leadership and Management)The field of school leadership is currently preoccupied with the new idea of distributed leadership. Harris (2009:3) also writes that it is irrefutable that distributed leadership has become the idea of the moment. It is against this backdrop that this study aimed to explore the perceptions of teachers regarding the practice of distributed leadership in their respective schools. What propelled this research were the changes that are taking place in South African education system since 1994. This study explores the practice of distributed leadership in schools from a teacherbased perspective, rather than from the educational theorists and legislators’ point of view. The schools under study are the three secondary schools located within Johannesburg North District 10 in Gauteng Province. The research design followed a qualitative approach. Three secondary schools were sampled, and the data were collected through interviewing the teachers of different post levels (including principals), as individuals and in pairs. Documents containing minutes of the planning sessions and the first staff meeting were also used to triangulate the data. These documents showed how roles and responsibilities are allocated to each teacher in those three sampled secondary schools. The findings revealed that there are both benefits, and inevitable and inherent threats to the implementation of distributed leadership in the three schools. The benefits are that distributing leadership can raise school’s collective capacities, empower staff, and can encourage collaborative school cultures and decisionmaking; and all these can make the school effective because there is coperformance, collective agency and conjoint effort in running the schools’ affairs. However, there is inherent threat posed by the school’s hierarchical structure and the policy climate within which schools operate. These barriers cannot simply be underestimated or ignored, and it is naïve to assume that they would simply fall away to accommodate and support distributed leadership in schools