This study explores school leaders' and teachers' experiences of leadership in assessment during the Covid-19 lockdowns. A total of 148 school leaders and 582 teachers participated in a survey, and ...15 school leaders from four schools also participated in focus group interviews. In Norway, the pandemic led to closed schools for long periods, from spring 2020 to spring 2022. Moreover, all final exams were cancelled, and all final gradings were made by individual teachers. In a disruptive and chaotic situation, it was up to school leaders at each school to ensure that teachers' assessment practices used to decide students' final grades were valid and reliable. The extraordinary circumstances that the pandemic created in schools also created a need for leadership functions beyond the ordinary. It seems that the disruptive situation during the Covid-19 school lockdowns led to a re-distribution of school leadership tasks connected to assessment, which in turn motivated more development and innovation, even stronger collaboration, and a more focused ability to solve problems related to assessment challenges in school. This study also revealed a need for more teacher support and assessment capability within school leadership to ensure fairness, validity and reliability in final assessment.
Distributed leadership has been shown to improve teacher job satisfaction and reduce teacher job stress. However, few studies have thoroughly explored the indirect effects of distributed leadership ...on increasing the teachers' burden in school administration and management, thereby increasing work stress, and decreasing job satisfaction. Data from the Teaching and Learning International Survey were analyzed to investigate the relationships among distributed school leadership, teachers' job stress, and job satisfaction. A total of 3976 teachers from 198 junior high schools in Shanghai, 2560 teachers from 166 junior high schools in the United States, 2376 teachers from 157 junior high schools in England, and 3573 teachers from 238 junior high schools in Australia were selected and examined using structural equation modeling. The results revealed that distributed school leadership directly predicted teachers' job satisfaction; teachers' job stress had an independent mediating effect on distributed leadership and teachers' job satisfaction, whereas teachers' time spent participating in school leadership had no mediating effect. We discuss the benefits of distributed school leadership on teachers' job satisfaction and the possible mechanisms for promoting it in practice.
