“I’ve got a pretty good grasp of my area and how to teach it, but that’s not enough when I’m working with teachers.”

The focus of this case is pedagogical leadership as a critical component of inservice teacher educators’ practice. As inservice teacher educators, we often have deep content knowledge in a particular learning area but find it challenging to support colleagues or teachers to develop more effective, responsive teaching in that area. Pedagogical leadership (sometimes also called “instructional leadership”) can be a particular challenge for leaders of professional learning in schools, such as literacy leaders or heads of departments. For them and other inservice teacher educators, there can be pressure to provide a “quick fix” when the real need is to build knowledge of content and how to teach that content in response to identified student needs.

Case participants

Background

Wakatipu High School is a decile 10, year 7–10 school with a roll of 750. Several years ago, an ERO report highlighted student underachievement as an issue for the school. In response, the school increased its focus on professional learning for staff and on the importance of literacy across all curriculum areas. The two associate principals lead professional learning with strong support from the principal. They articulate a vision that pedagogical leadership in the school will be provided by heads of department and others. Professional learning groups meet regularly to discuss challenges in their specific areas and to examine research and what it says about effective practice.

When she was first appointed, Joanna Helby, the school’s literacy leader, had a background as a visual arts teacher and a learning support teacher, specialising in teaching students with dyslexia. The school provided her with strong support in her role, encouraging all teachers to participate in professional development in literacy and making clear its expectation that all teaching programmes would address students’ literacy needs. Although she had reasonable literacy content knowledge, Joanna needed to build confidence and capability as a pedagogical leader in this area in the school.

As part of the Secondary Literacy Project, the school was able to use Education Associates, a small Dunedin-based educational consultancy, to work with Jo in building both her expertise as a literacy leader and the secondary literacy programme in the school. Trevor McDonald is one of the two partners in the company.

Commentators

Leading ISTE learning for this case

How this case reflects the ISTE inquiry and knowledge-building cycle

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