Traditional educational leadership models often rely on hierarchical authority and standardised professional development. This interpretivist study examines an alternative approach—distributed leadership enacted through Communities of Practice (CoP)—in which educators collectively develop pedagogical expertise, professional identity, and institutional agency in early-years STEAM education. Over four months, twelve participants—ten early-years teachers working across diverse curricula and two museum learning specialists—engaged in sustained collaborative professional learning. Employing methodological triangulation, data were generated through pre- and post-semi-structured interviews, participatory observations of CoP meetings and classroom practice, reflective questionnaires, and iterative lesson co-design documentation. Reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022) examined leadership and professional learning processes across Wenger's (1998) three CoP dimensions: domain, community, and practice. Findings indicate significant professional learning enacted through distributed leadership. Teachers shifted from largely isolated practitioners to collaborative leaders, developing shared pedagogical authority and exercising institutional agency within curricular and organisational constraints. Leadership extended beyond schools as museum learning specialists enacted adaptive, cross-sector leadership, translating experiential expertise into curriculum-aligned pedagogical support. Overall, the Community of Practice functioned as a distributed professional learning infrastructure, enabling collective agency and relational expertise through human-centred collaboration rather than top-down professional development. This study advances understandings of educational leadership by foregrounding human-centred collaboration as the foundation for sustainable pedagogical innovation. It demonstrates how Communities of Practice cultivate collective agency, relational expertise, and capacity for institutional change—key leadership competencies in culturally diverse educational contexts where formal support structures remain limited.

Authors:
Khawla Alsada, University College London, United Kingdom

About the Presenter(s)
Khawla AlSada is a part-time educational researcher at Qatar University. Her research focuses on Communities of Practice, museum-school partnerships, and leadership in early-years STEAM education

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