Informal Leadership and Policy Enactment in Secondary Schools: A Conceptual Framework for School-Level Implementation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54097/63wkrq21Keywords:
Informal Leadership, Policy Enactment, Collective Sensemaking, Teacher Participation, Secondary SchoolsAbstract
Policy implementation is an enduring obstacle in contemporary educational reform because education policy is constructed and performed differently across school contexts. Research about policy enactment has focused on how both policy actors and context come together to facilitate better outcomes; however, it overlooks the role of informal leadership in school-level policy implementation. In this paper, we aim to develop a conceptual model that represents informal leadership as a resource for policy enactment in secondary schools. This framework has four interrelated theoretical moorings: policy enactment theory, distributed leadership theory, teacher participation literature, and school-level sensemaking theory. Based on these perspectives, the paper contends that informal leadership is a significant organizational resource that promotes teacher involvement and collective commitment to policy initiatives. By engaging with each other, teachers create common understandings of policy intentions and engage in collective sensemaking that aids enactment within particular schools. This paper proposes a conceptual framework that highlights collective sensemaking as the mechanism connecting informal leadership to policy enactment. In addition, school context (organizational culture, structures, resources, and professional networks that help shape the implementation process) is understood to be a contextual-level influence on implementation. The integration allows for a more comprehensive explanation of school-level policy enactment and underscores the necessity of collaborative leadership and collective meaning-making in educational reform. This paper contributes to the literature on school-level action concerning educational policy by expanding understandings of enactment beyond formal, top-down leadership and by situating its conceptual model within new theoretical frameworks to inform future comparative research on transformational change.
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