1.2 Shared leadership

Traditionally school leadership has been that of the top-down approach adopted from business and industrialorganizations where the leader leads, makes key decisions, motivates, and inspires. While this approach has been popular ineducational administration in the past, it is highly unlikely that a single person can provide the necessary leadership for allissues. Leaders and followers of today need to let go of that expectation and embrace new ways of leading. One way is to emphasisa shift from the formal leader to a shared leadership model. Instead of a single individual leading to success, otherindividuals, who are partners or group members, take on the responsibility for leadership.

"We no longer believe that one administrator can serve as the instructional leader for an entire school without the substantial participation of other educators"(Lambert, 2002). This formal model has several weaknesses. For example, when the principal leaves anypromising change that has been implemented fades away. Under No Child Left Behind, we are under pressure to provide qualitylearning for all students and quality results on test scores. Instructional leadership must be a shared, community undertaking. Leadership is the professional work of everyone in the school(Lambert,2002). Teachers have extraordinary leadership capabilities, and their leadership is a major untapped resource for improving our nation's schools (Barth, 1990). When administrators learn to tap this resource, they will have a wealth of knowledge available to them. Often times it is not only the team leader that possesses the leadershipcapabilities but also the quiet team member that assumes the role of curriculum specialist.

Shared leadership defined

Shared leadership has many names including partnership-as-leadership, distributed leadership, and community of leaders. Under the shared leadership model, the vision for a school is a place whose very mission is to ensure that students, parents, teachers, andprincipals all become school leaders in some ways and at some times(Barth, 1990). According to Russ S. Moxley, the idea of leadership as partnership suggests the basic concept of two or more people sharing power and joining forces to move toward accomplishment of a sharedgoal(Moxley, 2000). The main job of the administrator in distributed leadership is to enhance the skills and knowledge of the people in the organization, use those skills and knowledge to create a common culture of expectations, holding the organization together in a productive relationship with each other, and holding individuals accountable for their contributions to the collective result (Elmore, 2000). Principals can develop a community of leaders by openlyarticulating the goal, relinquishing decision-making authority to teachers, and involving teachers before decisions are made (Barth).When teachers are included in the decision-making process ahead of time, they are more likely to implement change. For example, whenteachers are included in deciding what the behavior plan will be school-wide, they are more likely to ensure that it is used intheir classroom effectively.