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.