Secondary Education Managers/Executives/Administrators
OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to identify the prevalent shared leadership practices of middle school teachers who participate on interdisciplinary teams and teachers who participate in the whole-faculty group process.
METHODOLOGY The target population included teachers from two middle schools located in Lake County, Illinois for the 2003-4 school year; one of which established the whole-faculty study group process (as designed by Carlene Murphy) and the other an interdisciplinary team structure (as recommended by the National Middle School Association). Forty-five respondents in the interdisciplinary teams and 41 in the whole-faculty study group completed the TEAM version of the Leadership Practices Inventory and provided demographic information.
KEY FINDINGS The most frequently utilized leadership practice in the interdisciplinary teams was Enabling, followed by Modeling, Encouraging, Inspiring and Challenging, and the same rank order at the top (1-3) was found for whole-faculty group respondents. The leadership practices of Enabling, Modeling and Encouraging were significantly more prevalent for the teams than it was for the study groups. Generally the demographic differences (e.g., years of teaching, educational level, previous interest in leadership) between the two (teams and study groups) did not account for any differences in their perceptions of leadership practices.