The importance of middle leadership for school improvement

Abstract

The significance of instructional leadership for student outcomes has been evident for the past 15 years (Robinson et al., 2008). However, the focus on the principal as the main instructional leader has been challenged (Bush, 2013; Hallinger, 2019), because of increasing recognition that this needs to be a shared role, for two reasons. First, principals have insufficient time to carry out such an important role by themselves. Second, they lack the specific subject knowledge to be effective instructional leaders across the curriculum. This led to the development of the construct of shared instructional leadership (Marks and Printy, 2003). Middle leaders are crucial to the development of instructional leadership because they have the specific curricular expertise to lead and manage their subjects, to enhance student outcomes and to underpin school improvement. The first paper in this issue, Kylie Lipscombe, Sharon Tindall-Ford and Jodi Lamanna, provides a systematic review of literature on school middle leadership. They consider how middle leaders are defined, the responsibilities they hold, while also addressing impact and professional development. The authors note that middle leaders operate at the interface between different sources of influence in the school. Their literature review focused on two databases, Scopus and ERIC, and spans the period from 2006 to 2020. Their search identified 175 sources but, following careful screening, 35 were included in the final review, from 14 countries. They comment that middle leadership is distinct from principal leadership, and is not interchangeable with teacher leadership, despite some shared features. They conclude that school middle leadership is diverse, contextually driven, and important for advancing teaching and learning. Middle leaders are an integral part of a distributed approach to leadership, as they are often the colleagues to whom leadership is distributed. Weiping Yang and Sirene Lim examine the notion of distributed pedagogical leadership in a Singapore early childhood setting. They report on a case study of a non-profit childcare centre, to consider the conditions that support teachers’ distributed pedagogical leadership. They interviewed the principal three times, while each of the eight teachers took part in interviews and focus groups. Classes were also observed. The authors’ findings focus on three dimensions, the influence of the national context, school culture and power relations, and pedagogical vision. They conclude by discussing the implications of operating with a migrant workforce (Chinese and Filipino) within a bilingual setting (Chinese and English). The next paper, by David Woo, explores distributed leadership, through his study of ICT coordinators, who may also be regarded as middle leaders. He surveyed 27 such coordinators, including participants at an educational technology conference in Manila, Philippines, using both convenience and snowball sampling. The findings show that a school may employ more than one ICT coordinator, create different types of coordinator role, and have an organisational unit of ICT coordinators. He concludes that distributed leadership can be a useful analytical lens to think about the ICT coordinator’s role. Editorial