COLLABORATIVE SPACES FOR LEADERS: A PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH STUDY TO IMPROVE DISTRICT AND SCHOOL LEADER COLLABORATION

Abstract

When highly effective educators move into school leadership, their learning and growth are put on the back burner. Oftentimes, school leaders operate in silos within their school districts with little to no authentic collaboration with other school leaders or district administrators. The goal of this participatory action research study was to analyze the knowledge, skills, and dispositions of school leaders to improve the use of equitable practices. In this participatory action research (PAR) study, I created the conditions for school leaders from across a school district to collaborate and learn about equitable practices through a Networked Improvement Community (NIC; Bryk et al., 2015). Over ten months and three cycles of inquiry, three school principals and two district leaders met every 4-6 weeks as a School Leader Networked Improvement Community (SL-NIC) to collaborate and learn together about equitable practices. The study findings are: (1) School district leadership sets the tone for school leader agency through modeling effective collaborative practices; (2) collaboration among school and district leaders about equitable practices occurs through enacting a collaborative meeting structure; and (3) school leaders transfer and sustain collaborative meeting structures in their schools with teachers when they have time to process and find value in the work. The study challenges the existing structures by proposing a framework that includes a District and School Leader Collaboration Continuum that builds leader agency. The study has national, state, and local policy implications for school and district leader collaboration and learning.