Leadership in Small Online Collaborative Learning Groups: A Distributed Perspective

Abstract

We examined emergent leadership in small online collaborative learning groups of pre-service math and science teachers. Groups worked online to design interdisciplinary instructional units. We employed a distributed leadership framework (Spillane, 2007) and adapted a coding system previously developed by Li, et al. (2007) to determine that group leadership was highly distributed among participants and to illustrate that leadership emerged through different forms of participation described in this paper. Findings help validate the theoretical concept of distributed small-group cognition and lead to interesting research questions regarding the design and scaffolding of small-group learning online.