Dual enrollment experiment: Exploration for distributed leadership

Abstract

Leadership could be identified as a construct with unlimited definitions that are as idiosyncratic as the individuals seeking to frame its essence. While the contemporary study of scientific leadership dates back to the 1920s, the framework of educational leadership only began to evolve within the last 50 years. Specifically, distributed leadership has been studied world-wide within the context of school leadership for primary and secondary education systems. However, the study of distributed leadership within the academy has received little attention. In 2016, the Department of Education launched the Dual Enrollment Experiment, which allowed participating college and universities to award Federal Pell Grants to high school students enrolled in college courses. The three-year pilot program provided the context for this study, which explored the lived experiences of 16 campus leaders at four community college campuses using a distributed leadership framework. Utilizing a constructionist epistemology, interviews, surveys, dual enrollment documents and artifacts, and observational field notes were collected and analyzed for this qualitative study. Using the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning (CALL) as a conceptual framework, the study explored the leadership actions of individuals and teams that were responsible to execute the federal pilot at their campus. The exploration for distributed leadership led to findings associated with the five CALL domains and informed recommendations for future research and pragmatic opportunities for community college leaders to leverage distributed leadership thus creating equitable and diverse pathways of leadership at their campuses.