Peter Grootenboer and Kevin Larkin
The authors argue that middle leaders are the key educators in school-based educational development. Schools often secure small-scale funding to engage in government or systemic…
Abstract
Purpose
The authors argue that middle leaders are the key educators in school-based educational development. Schools often secure small-scale funding to engage in government or systemic initiatives, and these projects require a leadership “close to the classroom” if they are to realise sustainable educational gains. This leadership often comes from the middle leaders – those who practice their leading in and around classrooms. The paper aims to discuss this issue.
Design/methodology/approach
A single case study methodology is used to investigate two middle leaders, leading a small-scale project. Their leading practices are examined using the “theory of practice architectures”, to identify how these practices were enacted within their educational context.
Findings
While principals play a crucial role in enacting change, it is the middle leaders who are closer to the classroom than most principals, and whose practices more directly impact teaching and learning as they are best placed to ensure that meagre resources are well used to improve student learning. They do this by ensuring that development is collegial and a response to evidence-based needs.
Practical implications
First, middle leaders need support in facilitating educational development. Second, their leading practice is crucial for sustainable school-based development. Third, site-based educational development occurs most effectively when it is evidence-based. Finally, this form of educational development requires high-level collegiality.
Originality/value
This paper is original in two key ways: first, it addresses the under-researched practices of middle leaders; and, second it employs the practice theory to understand school leadership and development.
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Jane Wilkinson, Christine Edwards-Groves, Peter Grootenboer and Stephen Kemmis
The purpose of this paper is to examine how Catholic district offices support school leaders’ instructional leadership practices at times of major reform.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine how Catholic district offices support school leaders’ instructional leadership practices at times of major reform.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper employs the theory of practice architectures as a lens through which to examine local site-based responses to system-wide reforms in two Australian Catholic secondary schools and their district offices. Data collection for these parallel case studies included semi-structured interviews, focus groups, teaching observations, classroom walkthroughs and coaching conversations.
Findings
Findings suggest that in the New South Wales case, arrangements of language and specialist discourses associated with a school improvement agenda were reinforced by district office imperatives. These imperatives made possible new kinds of know-how, ways of working and relating to district office, teachers and students when it came to instructional leading. In the Queensland case, the district office facilitated instructional leadership practices that actively sought and valued practitioners’ input and professional judgment.
Research limitations/implications
The research focussed on two case studies of district offices supporting school leaders’ instructional leadership practices at times of major reform. The findings are not generalizable.
Practical implications
Practically, the studies suggest that for excellent pedagogical practice to be embedded and sustained over time, district offices need to work with principals to foster communicative spaces that promote explicit dialogue between teachers and leaders’ interpretive categories.
Social implications
The paper contends that responding to the diversity of secondary school sites requires district office practices that reject a one size fits all formulas. Instead, district offices must foster site-based education development.
Originality/value
The paper adopts a practice theory approach to its study of district support for instructional leader’ practices. A practice approach rejects a one size fits all approach to educational change. Instead, it focusses on understanding how particular practices come to be in specific sites, and what kinds of conditions make their emergence possible. As such, it leads the authors to consider whether and how different practices such as district practices of educational reforming or principals’ instructional leading might be transformed, or conducted otherwise, under other conditions of possibility.
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Susan Whatman, Jane Wilkinson, Mervi Kaukko, Gørill Warvik Vedeler, Levon Ellen Blue and Kristin Elaine Reimer
In these uncertain and risky times, the work that educators and educational researchers carry out may feel inconsequential. In preparing young people to live well in a world worth…
Abstract
In these uncertain and risky times, the work that educators and educational researchers carry out may feel inconsequential. In preparing young people to live well in a world worth living in, educators must consider, firstly, what roles they can play in a global environment riven by volatile economic, social, and environmental contexts, and secondly, the responsibilities they bear as researchers to produce forms of understanding, modes of action, and ways of relating to one another and this world.
In this chapter, we introduce the pedagogy, education, and praxis (PEP) network and how it is that we, as researchers from around the world, came together to discuss our researching practices in coming to know and explore educational research problems concerning equity, diversity and social justice within and across different cultural settings. We share short stories of ourselves to reveal how it is that we have come to know, be, and act as researchers in our projects and how working alongside each other – our mutual relatings – have generated further understanding about our own and each other’s researching practices.
This chapter establishes the purpose of the book, where we share empirical work through the lens of practice architectures. For instance, what is considered to be an educational equity problem across international or cross-cultural sites? What are considered acceptable forms of evidence of coming to understand educational inequity in its diverse forms in different sites? How are taken-for-granted research practices enabling and/or constraining different forms of understandings about educational inequity, including the issues to be researched and/or the direction of the research project? We then provide an overview of the remaining chapters.
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What is it like being a lecturer or teacher? 1 The classic image is an old, wise, and powerful stoic with oceans of knowledge: a bit like Yoda in Star Wars or Dumbledore in Harry…
Abstract
What is it like being a lecturer or teacher? 1 The classic image is an old, wise, and powerful stoic with oceans of knowledge: a bit like Yoda in Star Wars or Dumbledore in Harry Potter. With the rise of new technology in general and artificial intelligence (AI) in particular, teachers are no longer the sole source of knowledge. Does this mean that the teacher will soon be replaced by technology? Will AI take over?
This chapter considers the risks and benefits of AI in higher education. It argues that AI will not, should not, and, indeed, cannot replace the teacher, because of what is (for now at least) unique to the teacher: namely, her humanity. The idea is simple: to secure good education into the future, one must take advantage of teachers’ uniquely human expertise. State-of-the-art AI applications cannot be bodily present in the same way as human teachers, nor teach existential reflection, norms and values, or a sense of self, history, and society.
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Increasingly, schools are embracing action research as an innovative strategy to develop collective teacher efficacy and expertise in a bid to improve learner outcomes. In this…
Abstract
Increasingly, schools are embracing action research as an innovative strategy to develop collective teacher efficacy and expertise in a bid to improve learner outcomes. In this chapter, what follows is an exploration of the challenges frequently faced by middle leaders implementing and facilitating action research in schools. These include low levels of collective autonomy, clouded evaluative thinking, and the siloing of success. To support middle leaders in overcoming these challenges, Sarah and Pamela offer an array of practical solutions they have witnessed working successfully in varying contexts. In doing so, they spotlight the work of educational thought leaders, Michael Fullan, Professor Emeritus Helen Timperley, Dr Kaye Twyford, and Simon Breakspear.
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This study aims to discern medieval information literacy (IL) practices through scrutiny of medieval manuscripts: both the content and the “marks of usage” evident therein.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to discern medieval information literacy (IL) practices through scrutiny of medieval manuscripts: both the content and the “marks of usage” evident therein.
Design/methodology/approach
Analysis of the writing of scribes. Engagement with selected primary texts (manuscripts) and prior scholarly investigations.
Findings
Ample evidence exists of the practice of IL in the medieval era, and how it was transmitted and negotiated across time and space. Popular guides for scholars, including Hugh of St. Victor's Didascalicon, and the marks of usage left on manuscripts by readers/scribes, are evidence of how members of scholarly communities engaged in collaborative metacognitive work, helping each other with tasks such as understanding the ordinatio (organisation) of texts; cross-referencing; locating information; and making judgments about relevance, amongst others. New practices were stimulated by key historical transitions, particularly the shift from ecclesiastical to secular settings for learning.
Research limitations/implications
This is a preliminary study only, intended to lay foundations and suggest directions for more detailed future investigations of primary texts. The scope is Eurocentric, and similar work might be undertaken with the records of practice available elsewhere, e.g. the Arab world, South and East Asia.
Originality/value
Some previous work (e.g. Long, 2017) has investigated medieval scholarly communities by retrospectively applying notions from practice theory, but no prior work has specifically focused upon IL as the practice under investigation.