Distributing Leadership in a Junior-High‑School Classroom: A Practitioner Inquiry into a Head Teacher's Practice of Home‑School Co‑education and Student Self‑governance

Abstract

The head teacher (banzhuren) holds a distinctive leadership position in Chinese junior high schools: one teacher takes complete charge of a single class in terms of academic supervision, moral education, home-school communication, and safety responsibility throughout the entire school stage. Although existing studies have examined head teachers from the prospectives of moral education and administration, the position has rarely been elucidated as a case of distributed leadership. Drawing on the distributed leadership literature, this article reports a practitioner inquiry into the author's own practice as head teacher of a 49‑student Grade 8 class in a public junior high school in Chengdu, where the author concurrently serves as director of the school safety office. Analysis of two semesters of authentic practice documents-more than twenty issues of a weekly co‑education newsletter, a whole‑school duty‑week scheme, student self‑development check‑in records, and archives of parent salons-yields three themes. First, the weekly newsletter operates as a leadership artifact that converts families from information recipients into co‑educators. Second, institutionalized routines built on the principle of “everyone has a post” distribute governance outward to students. Third, the head teacher acts as a boundary spanner and symbol‑maker across class, family, and school systems. The study extends distributed leadership from the whole‑school level to the classroom level and offers grounded implications for China's school‑family‑community co‑education policy.