Learning for leadership: Understanding adult learning to build school leadership capacity

The objective of this research is to more deeply understand how individual school leaders develop the capacity to enact effective leadership practices. While leadership has been identified as a key variable for school improvement, relatively little is known about the processes for developing school leaders. Policy makers, program developers and school staff thus lack the theoretical frameworks and empirical data that are critical to guiding leadership development strategy and practice. The Distributed Leadership (DL) Program, provides the site for this research, and represents a robust and innovative approach to developing school leadership capacity through intensive training, team building, coaching and building-based professional development. A quantitative sampling framework was employed to identify participants based upon their self-reported learning experiences and observed leadership enactment. Data was then collected through observations and in-depth interviews and analyzed using techniques from grounded theory and phenomenology. The findings suggest that leadership learning may not be best understood from a purely behaviorist or cognitive perspective. Rather, participants\u27 experiences of learning were deeply embedded in their psychological and social contexts, which both provided supports for and barriers to growth. Leader learning was found to be developmental, aligning with current frameworks for adult learning and suggesting that development efforts take a holistic approach to individual growth. Program participants learned to be more effective leaders as they became more self aware, more capable of self regulation, and more sophisticated in their understandings of themselves and their environment. The DL Program demonstrates that a multi-pronged approach to development, which includes social and behavioral supports, can provide the conditions necessary for significant personal development, as evidenced through the dramatic change in leadership capacity experienced by DL teachers and administrators. Understanding how individual leaders learn is fundamental to improving leadership development policies and programs. Improving the development of individual leaders, furthermore, has implications for the overall development of school leadership capacity to drive student learning. This research offers the hope that by deepening our understanding of individual change we can continue to grow and develop the leadership talent needed for the schools and children of today and tomorrow