This article explores the idea of distributed instructional leadership as a way to understand instructional leadership practice in comprehensive high schools. Our argument is that distributed leadership analyses allow researchers to uncover and explain how instructional improvement in high schools occurs through the efforts of multiple individuals working to simultaneously influence the contexts of leadership and the contexts of instruction. The distributed instructional leadership model draws on the full potential of distributed leadership to describe not only who is involved with high school reforms but also what situated tools, tasks, and routines are required to change and maintain improved teaching. The first part of the article develops an account of distributed instructional leadership as an approach to studying how leaders create high school learning environments, by drawing on research in distributed cognition. The second part provides an illustration of how the ideas of distributed instructional leadership were applied to the analysis of a curriculum-based reform in a comprehensive high school.

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Purpose:The authors adapted distributed cognition theory to provide a detailed account of how school leaders use knowledge of the new programs, existing initiatives, and school contexts to guide policy implementation. Research Design: The study used distributed cognition theory to show how policy implementation studies provide an occasion to understand the influence of context on practice. The article focuses on a case study of (a) a suburban district design of a teacher evaluation policy and (b) a principal's effort to use the evaluation program with the teachers in her middle school. The authors adapted the distributed cognition theory to provide an analytic framework to better address the issues of school leadership.Findings: The authors found that the design of the policy required teacher evaluators to address the tensions between summative and formative evaluation implicit in the program design. In this case, the principal relied heavily on her discretion to determine which features of the teacher evaluation policy would be emphasized with different teachers. The case also provided insight into how the principal reconciled the demands of evaluation with ongoing instructional and personnel demands. Conclusions: The distributed cognition framework provided a valuable tool for organizing close studies of the cognitive and contextual dimensions of leadership practice and can provide valuable information about how policies can be designed and used to shape real changes in everyday practice.

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