The practices of Middle Leading

In this next blog we continue to describe the practices of middle leaders. The focus last week centred on the connections between leading and teaching as the middle leader practises their leading in and around teaching. Here we conceptualise the types of managing and facilitating practices involved in the work of the middle leader; that is, the particular sayings, doings and relatings they enact in organising, managing and facilitating professional and curriculum development.

First, we acknowledge the debate in the leadership literature about leading being than administration and management, and agree it always has some managerial dimension. However, in our studies, their managing and facilitating has been fundamentally different from the administrative practices undertaken by senior leaders or managers. In general, this was because their practices are more directly related to classroom teaching and learning practices, and it was constituted in more collegial-like relatings. These collegial-like relatings are present in practices such as formal focused professional dialogue groups, informal discussions, coaching conversations, mentoring conversations and professional learning staff meetings. These practices are pre-figured by a distinctive kind of managing that involves, for example: 

• Organising professional learning meetings and events
• Administrating (e.g., compliance issues, school management)
• Facilitating strategic professional development opportunities for  others (e.g., through action research)
• Focusing development on educational issues, particularly improving  student learning
• Developing spaced learning activities that maintain both the  momentum and the professional learning focus

To manage these practices also requires in-the-moment facilitation; whereby the middle leader acts with others in the happeningness of the doing of the activity to develop and change teaching and learning practices within the school (their own as well as other teachers). In this way, their role as facilitator shifts from one of initiator and leader to simultaneously being one of coach and mentor. They are the motivated and motivator. They are both director and negotiator. They are designer and critical friend. They are convenor and participant. They are talk and action. And at the same time, they are the theorist and the pragmatist.

To do this, middle leaders create for themselves and for others, intersubjective spaces for teachers-as-learning-peers to meet one another in shared language, shared activities and shared and equal relationships.

The practice of Middle Leading (continued)

Middle leaders are uniquely positioned as teachers entangled in the leading, professional learning and teaching practices of the school or pre-school. Their work is critical in the professional learning landscape of the school because they exercise their leading in and around the teaching that happens in classrooms. It is the particularity of these classrooms as educational “hot spots”, where educational action-for-change is taking place, that drives the leading practices encountered and enacted in different sites. That is, the leading that happens is generally driven by ontological conditions that exist in the place of action. Middle leading therefore is site based and site specific as it responds to the circumstances and needs of the particular teachers and students in the particular classrooms in the particular schools in the particular communities. Although, their leading work often happens in parallel with other leadership practices in the schools (practised by principals and other executive members of the school), the role of the middle leader is critical for promoting and nurturing sustainable teacher learning in classrooms. This is essentially because the realities of the practices that happen in classrooms is also a key day-to-day matter for the middle leader, because they too teach, they too aspire to develop their own teaching practices. The development of quality educational outcomes - the core business of learning and teaching in schooling - are concerns of equal importance to the middle leader whose work involves engaging in (simultaneous) leading-teaching by managing and facilitating educational development through collaborating and communicating to create communicative spaces (as outlined in previous blogs).

The practice of Middle Leading

There are a many practices, tasks and activities that are undertaken by middle leaders, but some of the more prominent features have been identified through our empirical work. There is a lot of variety in these practices, and as we continue in our research we may organised these in a different way, but for now the three broad categories we have employed seem to be coherent. The three broad middle leading practices are:

1. leading-teaching;
2. managing and facilitating; and,
3. collaborating and communicating.

Taken on their own, these may not seem to be practices peculiar to middle leading, but over the next few posts we will be outlining and discussing how they relate specifically to leading in the middle.  These practices ‘hang together’ in the project of curriculum and professional development in schools. As we noted in the last post, in the light of our research we have concluded that:

The practice of middle leading involves engaging in (simultaneous) leading-teaching by managing and facilitating educational development through collaborating and communicating to create communicative spaces.

This defining statement is not comprehensive of all that is involved in the practice of middle leading, but it does seem to capture they key dimensions.