Meta L. Krüger

Although distributed leadership and inquiry-based working are relevant topics to primary education, there has been little discussion about how team members perceive these practices as meaningful in their day-to-day work. Following on from prior quantitative studies, the present study conducted a case study in which semi-structured interviews were employed to collect data. The findings suggested that teachers and their principal perceive distributed leadership and inquiry-based working as crucial to realizing educational change. More specifically, the case study showed how inquiry-based working could support distributed leadership and teachers’ ability to take the initiative to create educational change. Specifying the relationships could help teachers and school leaders to consciously leverage distributed leadership and inquiry-based working techniques to fully meet students’ needs.

This article studies the relationship between teachers’ perceptions of distributive leadership and inquiry-based work in primary schools and the resulting impact on those teachers’ capacity to contribute to educational change. The path analysis that tests the proposed model relies on questionnaire data collected from 787 teachers in 65 primary schools. The results indicate a direct, positive effect of distributive leadership on teachers’ collaboration and collegiality, as well as on their motivation to contribute to educational change. Inquiry-based work positively mediates the effect of such leadership styles on three aspects of teachers’ capacity to change: collaboration, professional learning activities, and motivational factors. Therefore, all three promising aspects can be reinforced if teachers adopt leadership roles and combine these roles with inquiry-based work practices.