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).