Peer‐assisted leadership: reducing educational managers’ professional isolation

Presents a study that verified the effects of the peer‐assisted leadership programme (PAL) on communication networks and professional isolation of educational managers. The study used a one‐group pre‐test post‐test design to test its hypotheses. The subjects were 41 educational managers from two school districts of the province of Québec, Canada. A first PAL group, from a suburban school district (n = 16), followed the programme in 1993‐1994. A second group (n = 25), from a rural school district of the northern part of Québec, participated in PAL in 1994‐1995. The study used the ÉSUL a validated French version of the University of California at Los Angeles loneliness scale, to assess isolation. A sociometric questionnaire inspired by the ones used by previous researchers was used to assess subjects’ informal networks. The results indicate that PAL significantly reduces professional isolation without greatly enhancing the extent of communication networks of participants.