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.