ABSTRACT
Leadership is the reciprocal learning processes that enable participants in a community to construct meaning toward a shared purpose. This is known as "constructivist leadership". Teachers have long attended to the learning of students and themselves; leadership asks that they attend to the learning of their colleagues as well. This kind of leadership is naturally engaging and leads to broad-based participation. Each time a school is forced to start over, its staff and community lose some of their personal energy and commitment. Building capacity in schools includes developing a new understanding of leadership capacity—broad-based, skillful participation in the work of leadership. Leadership capacity can be seen as a complex, interactive framework, with four types of schools and school communities. The four types of schools and school communities are low participation, low skillfulness; high participation, low skillfulness; high skillfulness, low participation; and high skillfulness, high participation.
