School middle leadership: A systematic review

Abstract

School middle leadership is a complex and increasingly important school leadership position, with research showing the significance of middle leadership to school improvement and teacher development. The purpose of this article is to identify and analyse empirical peer reviewed articles on middle leadership from 2006 to 2020, to understand how middle leaders are defined, the responsibilities they hold, the impact and professional development they are afforded, and to discover lacunae in studies to support further research. The review was conducted using Scopus and ERIC; a total of 35 articles across 14 countries were selected. Using Nvivo, narrative synthesis was utilised to analyse the articles resulting in four conclusions: 1) middle leadership is difficult to define; 2) middle leadership positions and responsibilities vary considerably and are best understood in context; 3) middle leaders directly and indirectly impact teacher practice, team development, school reform and professional learning, although there is limited direct research into their impact; and 4) middle leadership professional learning has not progressed to the point to adequately equip middle leaders for the complexity of their positions. The article highlights two distinguishable differences to separate teachers and middle leaders, and provides an operational definition, elaborated description and set of middle leadership characteristics to guide future research and policy advancement.

Pathways to the school principalship: An international scoping review

“…Fourth, reforms that promote school decentralisation and the wide adoption of distributed leadership have created new middle leadership posts that represent a pool from which potential principals can be recruited (Galdames et al, 2018; Huber and Hiltmann, 2010; Lipscombe et al, 2021; Onguko et al, 2012). Overall, this set of studies has focussed on whether, and why, teacher leaders and assistant /vice principals seek hierarchical advancement to the principal post (Avidov-Ungar and Arviv-Elyashiv, 2018; Guihen, 2018; Hirsh and Bergmo-Prvulovic, 2019; Oplatka and Tamir, 2009).…”

School middle leaders as instructional leaders: building the knowledge base of instruction-oriented middle leadership

“…We selected this area within the context of the evolving focus in global scholarship on instructional leadership at the mid-level position. Given the expanding and more complex role of middle leaders (Lipscombe et al, 2021) and their increasing instructional responsibilities (Koh et al, 2011), there is a need to review evidence on how middle leaders understand and enact their instructional leadership tasks and factors that shape this leadership. Current middle leadership research offers an empirical understanding of the nature and practice of middle leaders as instructional leaders.…”

“…In this review, we focus on instruction-oriented middle leadership. Previous scholars have paid attention to the nature of middle leaders' work in general (De Nobile, 2018;Lipscombe et al, 2021) and publication metrics alone (Harris et al, 2019). No previous study that we are aware of focusses specifically on middle leaders' roles as instructional leaders.…”

“…We selected this area within the context of the evolving focus in global scholarship on instructional leadership at the mid-level position. Given the expanding and more complex role of middle leaders (Lipscombe et al. , 2021) and their increasing instructional responsibilities (Koh et al.…”

“…In this review, we focus on instruction-oriented middle leadership. Previous scholars have paid attention to the nature of middle leaders' work in general (De Nobile, 2018; Lipscombe et al. , 2021) and publication metrics alone (Harris et al.…”