Curriculum Leadership by Middle Leaders

Theory, design and practice

Kelvin Heng Kiat Tan, Mary Anne Heng, Christina Lim-Ratnam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317643500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

Curriculum Leadership by Middle Leaders focusses on major issues relating to the continuing national and international discourse on curriculum leadership, and highlights the vital role of middle leaders in schools. School leadership has focused primarily on first-order change involving school leaders or principals. This book seeks to put the spotlight on second-order change that involves curriculum leadership and professional development support on the part of middle leaders for more sustainable and long-term change in teaching and learning that will influence what happens in classrooms. With timely and thought-provoking contribution from authors who pursue a range of scholarly interests in multiple educational settings, the book is guided by several underlying questions:

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• How might we re-envision curriculum leadership so that it addresses both local and global concerns and aspirations?

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• How might we better grasp how middle leaders understand and respond to the pressures of educational reform initiatives?

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• How might middle leaders transform pressures into possibilities?

This book will appeal to current teachers, those currently undertaking teacher training and students or academics carrying out research in the field of educational leadership.

Chapter 1

Curriculum leadership by middle leaders

The Singapore story

Mary Anne Heng, Christina Ratnam-Lim & Kelvin Tan

Introduction

The educational leadership literature has typically focused on the major role that school heads or principals play in innovating and reforming schools. School leadership has traditionally been located in individuals with formal roles or positions in schools (Leithwood et al., 2007). With the complexities of education reform policies impacting upon school change, the idea of distributed leadership as a shared view of leadership grounded in the everyday work of schools has become increasingly influential (Leithwood et al., 2007; Spillane, 2005).

In the last thirty years, the terms “middle management” and more recently, “middle leadership” have been established in the educational leadership literature. Middle leadership is commonly defined as comprising the roles relating to middle management and subject leadership (e.g., Camburn, Rowan, & Taylor, 2003). Middle-level leaders are in the forefront of leading teaching and improving student outcomes, and it is only recently that their potential has been explored more fully.

Middle leadership has been described as the “engine room of the school” (Toop, 2013, p. 58). Middle leaders are in a unique and important position as a bridge between school leaders and teachers. Middle leaders work closely with the school leadership team in understanding the challenges and directions of the school. They are also expected to lead a team of teachers in their department or level in curriculum and teaching matters. As curriculum specialists who work with teachers in the day-to-day teaching matters, middle leaders play an important role in the implementation of school policy and initiatives at the school and classroom levels. Hence, middle leaders provide the link between principals and teachers and are closer to the action of daily work by teachers and students.

The term “curriculum leader” refers to a school administrator who is an instructional leader and change agent. The curriculum leader is part of a leadership network comprising other curriculum specialists. Such a model encourages curriculum leaders to enhance knowledge, understanding of subject matter expertise and effective classroom strategies to make some positive changes in the curriculum (Glatthorn, Boschee, Whitehead & Boschee, 2011).

Current professional development recommendations serve to encourage teachers to improve what they are doing and learn about best practices, with a focus on the “how” of effective teaching. With the complexities of globalisation and push towards sustainable school change, scholars (e.g., Kesson & Henderson, 2010) have argued for a more compelling and urgent need for teachers to learn to challenge assumptions of their work and practice, explore emergent curriculum ideas and make connections to their professional lives. For curriculum leadership to be transformative, middle leaders need to be a catalyst to help teachers ask about and interrogate the “whys” of teaching and develop some form of “educational artistry” that has been given voice by educational luminaries such as John Dewey, Joseph Schwab, Maxine Greene and Elliot Eisner. At the heart of this artistry process is the individual educator’s personal journey of understanding and musings, thinking and reflecting about ideas (Kesson & Henderson, 2010). In transformative curriculum leadership, the work of the curriculum is never complete, but about continuous growth through inquiry, developing and enacting educational programmes in the best interests of students (Henderson & Gornik, 2006).

Aims and relevance of this book

The genesis of this book is from a programme entitled Management and Leadership in Schools (MLS) for aspiring heads of departments (HODs) in Singapore schools that has been taught since 2007 at the National Institute of Education (NIE), the sole teacher education institute in Singapore. The editors and authors have been involved in teaching in the MLS programme and have developed research and teaching materials that speak to the context of the professional development of HODs. We have also been involved in teaching HODs, teachers and school leaders across a spectrum of levels and school and organisational contexts in graduate-level programmes at NIE. We have had the opportunity to engage in substantive deliberations with HODs about various issues in curriculum development and leadership and have observed that there is a significant gap in the literature in the professional leadership role of HODs.

In the Singapore school system, the office of HOD is a formalised role within the school organisational structure. Each HOD leads and manages a department within a school. In many schools, the HODs are part of the school leadership team. Over and above their high teaching workload, HODs are engaged in multiple roles and responsibilities as they work with school principals to implement school policies while concurrently seeking to understand the concerns of teachers in daily classroom teaching and operations in response to policy implementation. Hence, the HOD office is often called the middle management or middle leadership and is set against the context of distributed leadership in school.

This book is about the possibilities of curriculum leadership as theory, design and practice as enacted by middle leaders in Singapore schools. Traditionally, school leadership has focused primarily on first-order change involving school leaders or principals (Hoban, 2002). Educational change has typically been viewed from a first-order, mechanistic paradigm where the conception of teaching is about the mastery of discrete skills. Research has indicated that teacher learning from one-off professional development workshops is not readily transferrable to the classroom because of the unique contexts of schools and the interrelationships among change factors. We believe that good curriculum work is context- and case-specific and based on the “here-and-now” of human experience (Dewey, 1938/1997; Schwab, 1969).

This book seeks to highlight second-order change (Fullan, 2011), which is a systems thinking approach to understanding the complex nature of educational change. This book gives focus to the potential for curriculum leadership and professional development support on the part of middle leaders for more sustainable and long-term change in teaching and learning that will influence what happens in classrooms.

This book seeks to examine how curriculum leadership could be enacted in Singapore schools. Each contributing author takes a bold step forward to confront as well as reimagine the central and pressing educational questions for our time. We do so by paying particular attention to the work of teachers and middle leaders in schools. Specifically, the aims and relevance of this book are as follows:

• 1 Engage with how middle leaders in Singapore schools do or enact curriculum in ways that highlight questions of content, purpose and interacting factors in school change (Biesta, 2013). This seeks to recognise the connections or interactions between all aspects of education, such as Dewey’s child and curriculum, school and society, experience and education, as opposed to polarised, either-or thinking that focuses on curriculum content or instructional process, child or curriculum (Biesta, 2014). This involves taking a broader, deeper and more critical perspective to curriculum, teaching, learning and assessment in Singapore schools. This is about curriculum leadership as theory.
• 2 Understand the ways in which middle leaders can provide leadership in curriculum design. This is about negotiating the “what” or scope of curriculum leadership, namely, the tensions and possibilities between the formal structure of national curriculum thrusts, on one hand, and a more deliberative approach to the dynamics and complexities of a transformative curriculum, on the other hand—a curriculum with teachers and students at the centre, as opposed to an outcomes-based model of curriculum driven by a performance culture with a predominant focus on high achievement scores and international benchmarks. This is about curriculum leadership as design.
• 3 Understand how middle leaders think about the curriculum. Curriculum leadership is situated in the lives of teachers and actual teaching and learning occurs in the real lives of teachers. To understand how middle leaders interpret and reflect on the curriculum involves a critical examination of the contextual conditions of middle leadership and the challenges middle leaders face in leading curriculum change. This is about the “how” of curriculum leadership. Teaching is full of unique and unexpected circumstances that go beyond the technical application of research-based action steps and best practices. Leading change in curriculum and teaching requires the professional judgment and decision-making of middle leaders working together with teachers not only to develop professional knowledge, but also to change mindsets, beliefs, values and commitment with courage and imagination. This is about curriculum leadership as practice.

The targeted readership for this book would include teachers, heads of departments and teachers playing other middle leadership roles, school leaders, teacher educators and education researchers not only in Singapore, but also in the larger international community beyond the Asia-Pacific region.

In Chapter 2, Hairon, Tan, Lin and Lee draw from findings from a case study in one primary school in Singapore for a grounded empirical examination of enactments of curriculum leadership. Focusing on the work of leaders in the context of curriculum initiative has provided empirical evidence to help in the development of the curriculum leadership construct, along with its multiple dimensions. Their main findings show that the leadership practices supporting curriculum development in the school tend to be influenced by macro policy and social forces, such as understanding and responding to the national curriculum, modifying the national curriculum to suit school needs, revising the school curriculum to suit the national curriculum and being accountable to the needs of different stakeholders. Of the four curriculum development activities identified (planning, designing, monitoring and reviewing), monitoring plays a prominent feature in leadership practices supporting curriculum development. A core dimension of the curriculum leadership construct is collaboration to support the school’s curriculum with different staff members collaborating with one another so as to ensure integration of the school’s curriculum. This signifies the importance of establishing a collaborative culture where open communication is the norm.

Mardiana and Lim in Chapter 3 also draw from lessons learnt from a case study of how a Singapore school carried out school-based curriculum development to illustrate what practitioners in schools need to do in order to fully benefit from curriculum theories in the context of the local school. Through interrogating the social premises of curriculum theories and their assumptions of what schools do, Mardiana and Lim discuss a number of their significant insights, as well as the extent to which they might also speak to different notions and constructions of schools, societies and the curriculum, bearing in mind that these curriculum theories have been developed out of contexts in the US and elsewhere, and in response to local social and political conditions. Their premise is that theories about curriculum development written elsewhere will of necessity be rearticulated and practised in creative ways in different contexts, highlighting the need for middle leaders to carry out curriculum theorising which involves being sensitive to emerging patterns in various phenomena (by reviewing literature, data and contextual realities) and by identifying common patterns and issues (with the help of theories) to one’s own curriculum and teaching context.

Chapter 4 by Ratnam-Lim is based on the premise that curriculum leadership means that teachers exercise their professional discretion to design their own curriculum, which involves making defensible decisions. The process of decision-making is often riddled with contradictions and dilemmas. As such, curricula are, by necessity, incomplete and imperfect, and yet they can be seen as defensible and relevant according to the context for which they are developed. Using Eisner’s (2002) levels of curriculum decisions, in which two sets of dilemmas are used, the scale and scope of our attention (that is, from the general to the particular) and the time at which and for which curriculum decisions are made (that is, for the present or for the future), the curriculum leadership roles of middle leaders in four contexts are discussed. Examples of curriculum projects designed by middle leaders working in teams are included in the chapter, as illustrations of curriculum decisions that middle leaders are capable of making.

In Chapter 5, Tan, K., examines the influences of examination-oriented assessment on curriculum agendas and practices, and argues for rethinking how curricula may be reconstructed for imminent learning. Crucial roles for curriculum and assessment leadership are identified and recommended. A dialogic model of feedback promulgated in assessment for learning practices is explored as a means of developing systematic and structured ways for middle leaders to provide leadership in assessment for teachers. In addition, he argues for curriculum and assessment changes to aspire towards threshold levels rather than steady improvement within glass ceilings and offers recommendations for developing threshold levels of assessment leadership in Singapore.

In Chapter 6, Tay examines the role of HODs in assessments and explicates underlying issues around three questions: what are some obstacles to quality assessment? What does learning require of assessment? What does assessment require of HODs? Tay explains that being positioned in the middle can give HODs a vantage point to exercise assessment leadership, both at the particular level of the classroom and at the general level of the whole school. HODs can role model the competencies needed to design quality assessments; they are in a position to lead the department in clarifying the purpose of assessments and identifying standards and learning targets to be assessed, as well as identifying levels of good performance and flagging good feedback practices.

Leong in Chapter 7 encourages middle leaders to help their colleagues to take up the challenge to be active agents of formative classroom assessment. To do this, middle leaders need to empower teachers as active co-learners and co-creators of knowledge rather than just passive conduits of policy and research. This is not an easy task, as teachers have to respond to pressures of accountability by adhering to school or national directives. These demands often “fly in the face” of what they feel to be possible in a classroom or in the best interests of the students. Leong recommends that middle leaders address the widespread misunderstanding among teachers that some modes and practices of assessment are labelled as “formative” and others “summative” and address the tendency for formative assessment to become a series of teacher-led teaching practices. He also calls for middle leaders to challenge assumptions of assessment and learning and to determine some good localised practices for assessment for learning (AfL) that are already present in Asian classrooms. He calls on middle leaders to encourage their colleagues to see that they can integrate, appropriate and transform AfL practices in relation to student understanding within the contextually based constraints in the system and assist teachers by providing them tools and reflection questions to help guide what they attend to in teaching, how they interpret these events and how they draw inferences from these experiences to make informed teaching decisions.

In Chapter 8, Heng and Fernandez re-examine differentiation in Singapore schools and address big ideas and misguided notions of differentiation. They point out that many teachers believe they are addressing students’ learning needs in the classroom, when in reality, minor and piecemeal accommodations are made. Differentiation is widely recognised in the literature as a pedagogical and philosophical framework to modify teaching to create more equitable access to curriculum and teaching for students in schools. Differentiation in the classroom involves more than simply changing a single method of teaching. In the chapter, they present four big ideas of differentiation. With each big idea, they discuss misguided understandings about differentiation that they have identified in their work with middle leaders in Singapore schools over the years. In doing so, they seek to make problematic the notion of differentiation to challenge curriculum leaders to work with teachers to re-examine the decisions they make in planning curricula and in deliberations about appropriate teaching practices and meaningful student learning experiences.

Heng turns attention to students in schools in Chapter 9 and calls for middle leaders to take students’ learning seriously. She points out that the challenge for teachers in an outcomes-driven model of education in many school systems today is to see beyond the immediate, the practical and “what works”. Contemporary deliberations about the school curriculum have tended to privilege other stakeholders and marginalise students. What does it mean for curriculum leaders to help teachers take students’ learning seriously? To take seriously what students have learned, Shulman (1999) asserts that we need to take learners seriously. To do this, we need to get inside the learner and take seriously what the learner already knows and believes, and unless we can do this, any innovation in curriculum or pedagogy becomes futile. In the chapter, Heng introduces the clinical interview as a form of formative assessment that uncovers some of the deeper challenges concerning curriculum, teaching and learning. She...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Foreword
• 1 Curriculum leadership by middle leaders: The Singapore story
• 2 Grappling with curriculum leadership theory in schools
• 3 The contributions of curriculum theory and school-based curriculum development in Singapore schools
• 4 Decision-making in curriculum leadership
• 5 Curriculum and assessment leadership for learning
• 6 The role of heads of departments in assessments
• 7 Contextualising assessment for learning in Singaporean classrooms
• 8 Re-examining differentiation: Big ideas and misguided notions
• 9 Towards a practice of taking students’ learning seriously
• 10 Curriculum implementation in the Singaporean education context
• 11 Implementing ICT integration in Singapore schools –The role of middle leaders
• 12 Chinese teachers’ curriculum leadership through practical knowledge
• 13 Leading the lesson study process in schools
• 14 Advancing teacher knowledge: Considerations for a learning study approach
• 15 Utilising curriculum evaluation to improve the school’s curriculum
• 16 Looking ahead: The potential of curriculum leadership by middle leaders
• Glossary of acronyms and terminology used in this book
• Index