As more and more attention is directed towards public schools and the improvement of student academic achievement, one staggering finding keeps resurfacing in educational research: roughly half of all new teachers leave their current position within their first five years of entering the teaching profession. Although it is likely dozens of different professional and personal factors can influence such a choice, the literature suggests that building leadership has the potential to play a significant role in this decision. Thus, a few studies have examined the role principals play in novice teachers' induction experiences, yet such studies have primarily examined the issues at the elementary and middle school levels. Therefore, this study was originally designed to make a contribution to the literature by examining the influence the high school head principal has on novice teacher induction experiences in order to measure if the principal is a factor or not when a novice teacher is deciding whether or not to remain in his or her current teaching position. However, what the study evolved into was not limited to only an investigation of the principal's influence on induction, but rather an examination of the larger influence a distributed leadership process has on high school novice teachers' induction experiences. In order to examine the influence leadership has on induction, a qualitative case study was designed to explore the beliefs and perceptions principals, assistant principals, department chairs, mentor teachers, and novice teachers had regarding school leadership's influence on the induction process. Using volunteers who held these positions within two large suburban Michigan high schools, subject data was collected through semi-structured interviews. Interview data was then transcribed and analyzed through Spillane and Diamond's (2007) distributive perspective. What emerged from the data was the idea that a variety of high school building leaders are involved in the induction process. This distribution of leadership ranged from formal leaders such as head principals, assistant principals, and department chairs to informal leaders such as department peers. The ways leadership is distributed within schools has been written about extensively, and many different models of distributed leadership have been presented in the literature; however, little attention has been paid to the influences a distributed leadership process has on specific leadership tasks. Therefore, this study will begin to fill the gap in the research in two ways: 1) the study will examine the direct and indirect influences distributed leadership has on the specific task of novice teacher induction, and 2) the study will examine this influence at the high school level.
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