School Leadership of the Future: How the National Education Institute in Slovenia Supported Schools to Develop Distributed Leadership Practice

Current educational literature suggests that distributing leadership in schools can facilitate individual and organizational development. While many state agencies in the United States and Europe are encouraging schools to reshape their leadership practice to distribute responsibilities for leadership tasks across roles, empirical research on how external institutes can support such school leadership transformation are almost nonexistent. This paper presents the findings of an evaluation research that examined the function of school leadership teams, the new role of principals, and the strengths and weaknesses of the in-service training program designed and implemented by the National Education Institute in Slovenia with the purpose of building school capacity for instructional change.