School leadership practice across international policy contexts: Organizational roles and distributed leadership in Denmark and the United States

This comparative analysis applies a distributed leadership framework to data from teachers and leaders taking the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning (CALL). Because the policies educators in Denmark and the United States respond to in their daily practice are related through the transnational policy borrowing process, we are better able to understand how these policies impact educators in their respective countries by comparing their leadership practice through a shared lens: the CALL framework. In this exploratory analysis, we take a comparative perspective by asking: How does distributed leadership practice compare in the US and the Danish contexts of schooling? And: How do views on leadership practice vary according to professional roles in specific national and local (school) contexts? Our conceptual framework has three components: neoinstitutional theory, translation theory, and distributed leadership. We use multilevel confirmatory factor analysis and t-tests with SY2015–2016 CALL data to compare and contrast the pattern of leadership practices teachers and school leaders take-up in Danish and US schools. We found that the leadership practices aligned to a school-wide focus on learning are closely associated with the work of monitoring teaching and learning and building nested learning communities, particularly in the US context of schooling.