Designing Effective Structures to Foster Distributed Leadership in a Large, Multi-institutional Change Network

A major challenge faced by a multi-institutional change network is effectively engaging its membership in the work while maintaining coherence. In this session, we share the experiences of the Mathematics Teacher Education Partnership (MTEP), a networked improvement community (NIC) of over 50 institutions of higher education with the shared goal of improving secondary mathematics teacher preparation. One hallmark of a NIC is using a driver diagram--including an overall aim, primary drivers supporting the aim, followed by secondary drivers, and then specific change ideas--to organize its work. MTEP's driver diagram has been a primary tool for establishing a distributed leadership model. Four hubs addressing related sets of its secondary drivers were established, each with identified leaders and 4-6 members who were involved in the network initiation process. A cross-hub group coordinates the work across the hubs, including the hub leaders, with all hub members invited to participate. Subsequently, a second level of organization emerged, in which "subhubs" were formed around each of the hub's assigned secondary drivers, generally incorporating additional members to more fairly distribute the work. Several advantages of this evolving distributed leadership model follow. First, MTEP's identified leadership team expanded to include nearly 20 members, providing better representation of the institutions within the network. Second, the efficiency of the work has increased, as most of the work is done by the subhubs rather than the hub as a whole; marathon monthly hub meetings have been reduced to more manageable check-ins of the subhubs. Third, the network is less fragile; changes in personnel are more easily absorbed, as the subhubs can more readily reorganize. Following a description of our model, participants will be asked to reflect on how they might better organize their work to explicitly reflect their theory of action, whether or not presented in a driver diagram.