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The purpose of this paper is to cover a 10-year period in ten of Ontario’s 72 school districts on the nature, origins and importance of “leading from the middle” (LfM) within and across the districts.

The research uses a self-selected but also representative sample of ten Ontario school districts. It undertook three-day site visits in each of the districts, transcribed all the interviews and compiled an analysis into detailed case studies.

LfM is defined by a philosophy, structure and culture that promotes collaboration, initiative and responsiveness to the needs of each district along with collective responsibility for all students’ success.

To be sustainable in Ontario, LfM needs support and resourcing from the top. The current environment of economic austerity therefore threatens sustainability. Globally, examples of LfM are emerging in at least three other systems. The analysis does not have identical questions or respondents in phases 1 and 2. Ontario’s version of LfM may differ from others. The collaborative design may downplay criticisms of LfM.

LfM provides a clear design for leading in complex times. Compared to top-down leadership the whole system can address the whole of students’ learning and well-being. LfM is suited to systems and cultures that support local democracy, community responsiveness and professional empowerment and engagement.

LfM is an inclusive, democratic and professionally empowering and responsive process that differs from other middle level strategies which treat the middle merely as a way of connecting the top and bottom to get government policies implemented more efficiently and coherently.

The purpose of this paper is to examine gender identities of Chinese male and female middle leaders in secondary schools and how gender dynamics play in the leadership process and impact on career aspirations and career development.

This paper draws on the data of a larger qualitative study conducted using the life history approach. Cases of four male and female middle leaders, which are able to demonstrate the “efficacy” of life stories to enhancing our appreciation of the process of gender negotiation and the impact of gender dynamics on leadership behaviour, are reported.

Evidence suggests that traditional Chinese gender identities played out in the leader‐follower relationships although signs of hybrid gender identities were also evident in some cases. Gender identities and the family role perception of the middle leaders have impact on their career aspirations and development.

Findings yield implications for the professional development needs of Chinese middle leaders not only regarding their professional role but also their personal understanding of how gender identities and family role perception impact on their career development. Further study with overlapping and complementary methods to a larger sample could be more illuminating to this complex and multifaceted issue.

In the context of global concerns about the shortage of leader talent, the present study illuminates gender identities and the dynamics of the interactions between Chinese superiors and subordinates of different sexes and adds perspective to the leadership development literature.

Instructional leadership is a school leadership approach that places great emphasis on enhancing the quality of teaching and learning. This study explored the enabling factors of instructional leadership in subject coordinators.

The participants in this qualitative study were 24 subject coordinators in elementary schools in Israel. Data collection was based on semi-structured interviews, and data analysis included three stages: sorting, coding and categorizing.

The findings identified three significant enabling factors of instructional leadership in subject coordinators: pedagogical knowledge, relationship capability and support from the principal.

This study suggests that the enabling factors of instructional leadership in subject coordinators differ from those of instructional leadership in principals because of their different places in the school structure and explains the enablers of instructional leadership in subject coordinators as middle leaders.

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.

The purpose of this study is to understand the impact of gender in the sport business by investigating gender differences in entrepreneurial leadership and cultural values using quantitative methods.

In total, 241 surveys were completed by sport business owners in 4 countries in the Middle East.

The results revealed that gender differences and similarities are not only widely affected by national cultural values but also the effects of national cultural values vary between countries in the Middle East, despite these countries being similar in terms of habits, traditions, history, language and institutional systems. Additionally, it was found that entrepreneurial leadership is a role, task or responsibility that is related to both men and women in the sport business in the Middle East.

Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed, together with limitations and suggestions for future research.

This is the only study in the field of entrepreneurial leadership that examined the concept of entrepreneurial leadership in Middle East sport businesses.

This chapter explores the potential impact of middle leaders on their learning environments and on learning outcomes, focusing primarily on authenticity in leadership in schools. In outstanding schools, middle leaders are very active and visible in their curriculum areas, as well as more broadly around the school. They work together to build leadership capacity through the promotion of shared leadership practices based on a collective ethic of responsibility. They actively influence others to break down silos between departments and teams within a school. It is through the quality of their engagements that they project, maintain, and sustain their presence and influence with and on others. The work of authentic middle leaders is transformational insofar as they promote and support transformational teaching and learning for their students.

The purpose of this viewpoint paper is to explore middle leaders' ability to recognise emotions in the context of workplace research, and to propose measures that might support them in their role.

This paper combines a contemporary literature review with reflections from practice to develop more nuanced understandings of middle leadership. This paper applied the Geneva Emotional Recognition Test (GERT) to explore the level of emotional recognition of 86 individuals (teachers to headteachers (equivalent to school principals)).

The preliminary findings suggest that teachers and headteachers have higher levels of emotional recognition than middle and senior leaders. This paper subsequently argues that the task-orientated nature middle leadership compounds an individual's ability to engage effectively in relationship-orientated tasks. This explains why middle leaders scored lower on the GERT assessment. This is further inhibited by the anti-correlation in the brain's ability to deal with the task-positive network (TDM) and default mode network (DMN) processing functions where individuals operate in one neural mode for long periods.

The viewpoint paper proposes a number of implications for middle leaders and suggests that middle leaders should proactively seek out opportunities to be engaged in activities that support the DMN function of the brain and subsequently the relationship-orientated aspects of leadership, for example, coaching other staff members. However, it has to be recognised that the sample size is small and further work is needed before any generalisations can be made.

This paper offers a contemporary review of the role of middle leaders underpinned by a preliminary study into individuals' ability to recognise emotions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine leading from the middle, which is consistent with calls to distribute leadership, while expanding the direction of influence, from the normal top-down to include a bottom-up or lateral direction. The paper proposes that the position of the vice-principal enables the role incumbent to lead from the middle as a boundary spanner. The research question was what leadership from the middle looks like for vice-principals.

The study consisted of interviews of 28 vice-principals and 10 principals. A mixed case and theme-oriented strategy was adapted, with member checking with each vice-principal.

The findings indicate that in leading from the middle, vice-principals play boundary spanning roles of connecting, translating and brokering: (1) connecting between organisational levels, (2) translating between vision/direction and actualisation, (3) connecting between middle managers and (4) brokering and translating between the ministry and the school.

Leading from the middle is a nascent concept which is worth exploring, given the complexity of educational systems with multiple ecological levels, and the need for leadership to create coherence between the levels.

In Jamaican context, it is imperative to understand both the knowledge and the experiential gaps related to the wellbeing of middle leaders at the college level. Using qualitative, semi-structured interviews, this chapter explores the views of six middle leaders (in various roles) at two teacher training colleges in Jamaica to understand what initiatives, if any, existed in their institution to address faculty wellbeing practices and how they believed that their institution’s leaders could better address their wellbeing at work. The study’s findings pointed out that middle leaders attributed some initiatives as targeted to their wellbeing, but these were mostly linked to professional development endeavors aimed at bolstering their content discipline knowledge and instructional competence, whereas their struggle with unrealistic job expectations, heavy workloads, token remuneration for their senior posts, and lack of validation from the top executive leadership core have largely been unattended.

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.