MEDD8937 Chap.8 Roles of Curriculum Leaders
Roles of Curriculum Leaders
What the role is answerable for
The closing session names what a curriculum leader in a school actually does: advising and supporting the principal wherever the curriculum touches colleagues, resources or administration; supporting and urging teachers towards transformation for the sake of student learning and achievement; attending to teacher learning in the school and not only to student learning; and practising good curricular decision making by building a vision everyone shares, growing a culture of collaboration and spreading leadership out.
A separate account expresses the role as an order of operations instead: recognising areas of focus, considering the degree of acceptance among stakeholders alongside preliminary planning, engaging staff members in curriculum renewal, establishing the curriculum framework, and preparing for implementation.
The first list describes relationships the leader maintains and the second describes a sequence, and both are examinable.
Capacity is built through inquiry, not instruction
The published account of teacher capacity development names five outcomes: teachers reflecting on how and why they teach as they do, inventing curricular answers to problems thrown up by their own situation, coming to regard the curriculum as theirs, seeing further into what their professional work implies, and closing the distance between theory and practice.
Only the second produces an artefact; the rest are changes in how teachers see their own work, which is why they are pursued through inquiry. Curriculum inquiry work itself is described in three activities: noticing a pattern while it is still forming, working out which patterns and issues recur, and bringing what recurs back to the room you teach in.
The sequence runs from noticing to generalising to localising, and stopping after the second produces an accurate account of a problem nobody in the room has agreed to own.
Action research as the leader's instrument
The session sets out action research for curriculum inquiry in five moves: a question rooted in practice that states a curricular problem worth solving; a plan covering both the curricular or pedagogical change and the inquiry into how it goes; the change itself, watched either by the teacher or by a colleague, with data collected as it runs; reflection and evaluation on that data; and a further turn of the cycle starting from a sharpened question or from one that surfaced along the way.
The published example question asks whether students would structure an argument better if they were taught explicitly how to analyse the issues, and the plan that follows decides three things before anything is taught: how to teach it, how to collect data to monitor the effect, and how that data will be analysed.
Reading your own leadership as evidence
A study of a Hong Kong primary school analysed videotaped co-planning meetings of a Chinese curriculum development team to explore how distributed leadership affects teacher participation and how leadership styles mediate teacher development.
It reported that the visiting consultant and the panel head took over the talk between them, holding more than eighty-six per cent of the meeting, that teachers were passive and contributed little with interactions predominantly uni-structural and non-reflective, and that those leadership styles constrained both participation and development opportunities.
The method matters as much as the finding: talk time is cheap to collect, hard to argue with, and almost never collected, which makes it one of the few genuinely available measures for the monitoring section of an implementation plan.
What this chapter covers
- 01
What the curriculum leader role covers in a school
- 02
The same role expressed as an order of operations
- 03
Five outcomes of building teacher capacity through inquiry
- 04
Three activities that make up curriculum inquiry work
- 05
The action research cycle and its second turn
- 06
What a workable inquiry question has to name
- 07
Talk time and move sequences as evidence about leadership
- 08
How leadership style constrains participation and development
- 09
Separating the coaching role from the appraisal role
Diagnose a meeting from its talk distribution and move sequence
- 3State what the distribution and the move sequence each show.
- 3Say what the pattern costs, using frameworks from earlier chapters.
- 2Give two changes that are measurable next week.
Key terms
- Curriculum Leader
- The person who advises the principal on curriculum matters, supports and urges teachers towards change, attends to teacher learning as well as student learning, and practises curricular decision making.
- Distributed Leadership
- An arrangement in which leadership functions are shared across a team rather than held by one person, and whose effect on participation can be tested against what a meeting record shows.
- Curriculum Inquiry
- Work that moves from noticing a pattern while it is still forming, through working out which patterns and issues recur, to bringing what recurs back to the room you teach in.
- Action Research
- A cycle in which a practice question is planned, acted on and observed, reflected on using collected data, and then re-planned from a refined or newly emerged question.
- Pedagogical Design Capacity
- A teacher's ability to read a set of materials and construct instruction from them, one of the capacities a leader is trying to build through inquiry rather than instruction.
- Shared Vision
- An agreed account of what the curriculum is for, listed alongside collaborative culture and distributed leadership as a practice of good curricular decision making.
- Uni-structural Interaction
- An exchange in which contributions stand alone without being connected or reflected on, reported as the dominant pattern in a meeting where two speakers held most of the time.
Roles of Curriculum Leaders FAQ
Should a curriculum leader also carry out appraisal observations?
There is a case each way and the answer should be argued rather than asserted. The role explicitly covers advising the principal on curriculum-related collegial and administrative matters, and nobody has a closer view of the practice. Against that, coaching requires a setting free from external pressure, and a coachee who knows the same person writes her appraisal will manage the conversation.
The reconciling move is to keep both roles and separate them in time and in writing.
What makes an inquiry question workable?
It names a practice the teacher controls, an outcome she could see, and a comparison she could make. The published example asks whether students would structure an argument better if she taught them explicitly how to analyse issues, and the plan that follows settles how to teach it, how to collect data and how to analyse that data before any teaching happens.
A question failing any of those three produces a cycle that cannot conclude anything.
Why does the course end with evidence about leaders rather than about students?
Because the leader is the one variable a candidate can change immediately, and because the closing study shows leadership style constraining both teacher participation and teacher development. Measuring your own share of the talk and the proportion of your moves that invite a response is cheap, repeatable and uncomfortable, which is a reasonable description of most useful formative evaluation.
Assessment move
Record one meeting you chair and count two things: your share of the talk, and how many of your contributions required somebody else to answer. Both numbers are available within an hour, both can be compared next month, and either would be a defensible monitoring measure in your own implementation plan.
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