Case 2: Becoming a Pedagogical Leader
Te Tū hei Pouako

The focus of this case is pedagogical leadership as a critical component of ISTEs’ practice. ISTEs 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 (also sometimes 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 ISTEs, there can be pressure to provide a “quick fix” when the real need is to build knowledge of content and of how to teach that content in response to identified student needs.

Joanna Helby is literacy leader at Wakatipu High School in Queenstown. With strong support from the school’s leaders and from Trevor McDonald, an educational consultant, Jo has been working to build her confidence and capabilities as a pedagogical leader.

Leading ISTE learning for this case

As in Case 1, one of the strengths of this case is that it shows an ISTE’s learning over time and in a range of contexts. It provides a “big picture” of the inquiry by an in-school ISTE leader of professional learning experiences and so doesn’t explore individual practice situations closely in the way that Cases 3, 4, or 6 do.

There are a number of points in the case where comparisons with what’s happening in some of the other learning cases will generate rich discussions. These include:

• Beliefs, where questions on relationships within pedagogical leadership and the balance between providing support and challenge link well to the themes of Case 6;
• Learning experiences (see video Clip 3), where Trevor’s comments on the fundamental importance of modelling to his ways of working make for an interesting comparison with the views of Delwynne Stevenson in Case 1 (see video Clip 8);
• Learning experiences, where users are asked to think about how they work with others in relation to the roles of coach, mentor, and critical friend, allowing for interesting comparisons between the thinking of Trevor and Jo and Barbara Batchelor in Case 6.

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

Diagram text version

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