ABSTRACT
This project initially started from an Early Years Educator's desire to explore motivations for a specific practice, with a view to developing it from a position of understanding. The action research process caused the educator to also consider her own approach to leading practice through collaboration and discussion, as it exposed some additional factors in the team's differing beliefs in their roles for contributing to decision-making. In addition to institutional structures for formal leadership and management responsibilities, Early Years Foundation Stage settings can often have models of pedagogical leadership which are distributed amongst practitioners at different levels of qualification and experience. The shift in emphasis from conceptions of leadership in leading people to collective responsibilities for leadership of practice became an inadvertent focus of this setting's action research and intentions for future development in response to the action research project.
