Team leadership in upper secondary education

This article aims at presenting some of the findings from the Norwegian part of the 'Successful School Leadership Project'.(2) In order to adequately capture the complicated and dynamic nature of leadership in the participating schools, a distributed and micro-political perspective on leadership is chosen. The Norwegian team has been investigating elementary as well as secondary education, but we will for this presentation emphasize some general aspects of leadership in upper secondary education. Three upper secondary schools will be presented and used as examples in our discussion. Our findings underscore how school leadership is an interactive process involving many people and players. Geographical location, school history and size point to a variety of challenges, but in all schools we could identify success as a result of a continuous team effort. Leadership analysed within a distributed perspective can be described as an organizational quality in these schools. The many faces of distributed leadership in upper secondary education can best be comprehended in the light of the schools' historical, cultural, political and social context. The study also demonstrates how trust and power within distributed leadership of an organization were closely interrelated.(3)