Search results

As the role of senior school leaders has become more complex, the leadership of improvement, innovation and change has been distributed to middle leaders. However, middle leaders are often not prepared for the shift to strategic thinking and leading. This chapter provides an overview of what it means to think and lead strategically when leading from the middle. Then, the theory is translated into practical templates and tools that can be employed by a middle leader. The context of this chapter is leading a faculty in a secondary school; however, the ideas and examples provided are easily translated to any middle leading context.

The focus of this chapter lies with women middle-level leaders. It reports on themes from women in leadership programmes designed and delivered by Barbara Watterston, through the lens of a programme especially developed for the Association of Independent Schools of South Australia (AISSA). This chapter begins by profiling a description of the programme. The main aim was providing women leaders with an opportunity to take stock of their careers, consider ongoing challenges impeding their work as school leaders, and identify options for the future. After the programme finished, volunteers were invited to write a narrative encapsulating their career journey. Three women leaders volunteered, and their insightful reflections regarding their career trajectories constitute a significant portion of this chapter. The final part of this chapter identifies three common themes that emerged from their stories, resonating with ideas which are frequently illuminated in similar programmes and research. These include the importance of ongoing professional learning to be a successful leader, gender-based barriers that caused the women to doubt their abilities and readiness for leadership, and the deep appreciation the women expressed from learning with and from like-minded other women leaders.

This chapter explores middle leadership identity through the real-world accounts of how two middle leaders construct and develop their leadership identity and how this impacts the way their middle leadership is practiced. Leadership identity, an internal narrative of oneself as a leader which is practised professionally in context, represents a concept that is best understood as being unique to an individual, enduring over time, and a consequence of human experiences. Middle leadership is often the first promotion for teachers from teacher to leader and, as such, how middle leaders perceive themselves as a leader and how this formative process of leadership identity underpins middle leaders’ practices can make a significant impact on a leader’s decision making, professional relationships, behaviours, and actions. This chapter is co-authored by two researchers and two middle leaders with the intention of understanding middle leader identity development and its influence on middle leadership practices. Using interviews, middle leaders’ stories of identity were co-composed and re-storied to construct each middle leader’s narrative. This chapter concludes with a discussion on the influences of identity for middle leaders and considerations for leadership development.

This chapter explores the development of middle leaders in the specific context of Catholic schools. It considers the interplay between contemporary thinking on educational leadership and the insights of Catholic theology and ministry. Two key themes foundational to this interplay are examined: the connection between leading and following, and the central importance of relationships for leadership. For each of these themes, the reader is provided with related questions for middle leaders in a Catholic school context, an activity for engaging with leaders, and an exercise inviting middle school leaders to reflect on their own experience and the context within which they lead.

Middle leaders are educators whose practices of building relational trust are critical for generating the kind of strong and sustainable professional learning communities necessary for leading productive site-based education development in their school. This chapter specifically focuses how building an ethic of relational trust, experienced in five interrelated dimensions, aligns with establishing core foundational conditions for building community. Building trust and communities of professional learners are not mutually exclusive – in fact, each reciprocally facilitates, progresses, supports, and sustains the development of the other. The foundations for community building, described as cornerstones, form over time and progressively involve, and achieve, contextuality, commitment, communication, collaboration, criticality, and collegiality. Reflection questions are provided throughout; these are designed to directly focus the attention of middle leaders towards understanding and developing their own trust practices, that with time, create conditions for generating strong viable communities of professional practice.

I remember talking with Hugh Stephenson some time in the early 1980s after he returned from a trip to the Middle East. Hugh was in charge of Career Development for NCR and had been assessing the leadership and management skills of NCR leaders in the Middle East. I recall his amusement and his frustration as he remarked on how difficult it was from his Western perspective to interpret leadership motivation and drive when the answers to so many of his questions was tempered by, “If Allah wills.” This led us into a long discussion about assessing across cultures, including the challenge of seeing and interpreting things from a different cultural perspective, and the relevance of the NCR corporate model to leadership effectiveness in the Middle East. It would be another 18 years, however, before I was to gain first hand experience assessing and developing leaders in the Middle East.

During the latter-half of the twentieth century, researchers argued that the notion of universities being communities of scholars that were governed by scholars had been replaced by a mass-market higher education system. The new system is shaped by competition for students, a need to be budget conscious and, ultimately, a requirement for university leaders to be able to approach their work with a certain level of business acumen. This chapter examines what these pressures mean for those working at the middle level of university leadership, when they are increasingly appointed on managerial expertise but make decisions about academics and their work. Using Bourdieu's notions of fields to dissect these relationships, the chapter uses semi-structured interviews with faculty deans to examine how their work is guided by managerialist targets but impacts on their relationships with academics. The chapter highlights that, while the sector has acknowledged that successful leaders do not always need research profiles in the modern university, this often has a negative impact on leaders' relationships with academics.

This chapter presents a reflective study on the role of leadership in curriculum changes in Indonesian higher education. It was based on case studies carried out in 2012 and 2014 at Politeknik Negeri Jember (POLIJE), a vocational higher education institution (HEI) that was selected by the Ministry of Research, Technology and Higher Education of Indonesia as a pilot project implementation of the newly established Indonesian Qualification Framework. It describes the theoretical and contextual background of the study that was inseparable with the growing concern on globalization, internationalization, and democratization of HEIs worldwide. Meanwhile, curriculum changes since 1961 demonstrated the dynamic of the curriculum, which signified either the development of national education or instabilities in the individual HEIs. These signify the breadth, depth, and the contexts of ESD curriculum development in Indonesian HEIs, which confronted the leaders or managers with the complexity. This requires effective functions related to the change strategy and shared roles between the top and middle leaders in coping with the leadership, managerial, and academic issues within an interdisciplinary setting. In this top-down change, the intention to adopt the transformational leadership model was obvious in the level of top leaders, while in the middle leadership, practices were less hierarchical. The leaders both in the top and the middle levels had complemented to each other with low attention on the notion of organizational learning. In light of sustainable education, the notion of organizational learning gives the foundation for successful change and sustainable organizational development. It is because the best performance of an institution will strongly be influenced by the quality of investment in the capacity development of both the leaders and staff.