A Qualitative Study of the School Community Members’ Experience of Parallel Leadership in Schools

With an interpretive approach, this paper seeks to provide the graunded theory on how to distribute power and parallel leadership in large urban schools using the Charmaz’s method. The research focuses on the main question of what are the backgrounds, key processes, intervening factors, and consequences of leadership sharing in parallel in schools. Therefore, the data were collected from semi-structured interviews with 30 perpusful samples from school community members (principals, deputies, teachers, students and parents), field observations and reflective notes of researchers during six months in Sanandaj. Data were analyzed by neoclassical method and continuous comparison analysis with three-stage theoretical coding and 520 initial codes, 51 axial codes and 17 selective codes were counted. In this study, it was first revealed that the implementation of parallel leadership cannot be effective unless all those involved in the school have a correct understanding of how students learn, and ultimately it is the teachers and students themselves who determine the success of these efforts. As important as parallel leadership is in educational matters, it is important to create an organizational atmosphere and school culture in which leadership spontaneously emerges from teachers, students, parents, and other staff. Second, the establishment of parallel leadership reinforces the parallelism of school self-government and the concept of schools as unique entities with specific characteristics or cultures. Third, the importance of context and position in the implementation of parallel leadership and the need to avoid unrelated patterns were emphasized, and finally, the implementation of parallel leadership is in schools need of developing a learning and intelligent schools.