Beliefs
What did Jo believe about pedagogical leadership?
"I didn’t really have clear in my mind at all what I believed about pedagogical leadership.
I knew that content knowledge was critical – that, as a foundation for my practice, I needed a good understanding of what research and the literature were saying about the importance of adolescent literacy in students’ achievement.
I also believed that I needed strong pedagogical content knowledge because my job was to help teachers in different curriculum areas to make sure their teaching supported students' literacy.
I’d already encountered some resistance, so I was thinking a lot about the kinds of relationships I needed to establish with teachers and what it would take to get them on board. I came to believe that in order to be open to change, teachers needed to see two things:
- the benefits for their students of what I was asking them to do;
- what their changed practice might look like, which meant I would have to model it in their classrooms."
Perpectives
What do you believe about pedagogical leadership?
What does the term pedagogical leadership mean to you?
Whose ideas do you base this on?
How were your beliefs about pedagogical leadership evident in the practice situation you outlined earlier?
Engaging with the literature
Harris, 2003, page 21Pedagogical leadership is a model of leadership that places an emphasis upon the development of the school through the development of others. Sergiovanni (1998) describes “pedagogical leadership” as a form of leadership which invests in capacity-building by developing social and academic capital for students and intellectual and professional capital for teachers.
Instructional Leadership Challenges: The Case of Using Student Achievement Information for Instructional Improvement by H. Timperley (2005) (Web link)
In relation to knowledge, which is most critical for a pedagogical leader: content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, or pedagogical knowledge? Why?
Engaging with the literature
What is knowledge? (pages 95–97)
Where do relationships fit into your beliefs about pedagogical leadership? What do you see as the balance between providing support and presenting challenge?
Engaging with the literature
Robinson, 2007, page 5Effective leaders do not get the relationships right and then tackle the educational challenges – they incorporate both sets of constraints into their problem solving.
Leadership that supports interactive professionalism (pages 125–133)
References
A. Harris (2003). “The changing context of leadership: research, theory and practice” In A. Harris, G. Day, D. Hopkins, M. Hadfield, A. Hargreaves, C. Chapman, eds. Effective Leadership for School Improvement. London: RoutledgeFalmer.
V. Robinson (2007). “How School Leaders Make a Difference to their Students”. Keynote address to International Confederation of Principals, Auckland, April 2.
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