Middle leadership plays a pivotal role in shaping professional development within schools. In a recent webinar I explored how middle leaders can become the engine room for professional development in their teams and help their colleagues to grow and thrive.
The Role of Middle Leaders in Professional Development
Middle leaders serve as a crucial link between senior leadership and classroom teachers. Their position enables them to foster a culture of continuous improvement while implementing strategic initiatives designed to enhance teaching and learning. By actively engaging in professional development, middle leaders can:
- Provide targeted support to colleagues (it’s likely nobody knows them better!);
- Implement evidence-based teaching strategies (bringing subject knowledge and great teaching into one place);
- Encourage reflective practice among teachers (often by modelling this themselves);
- Drive long-term, sustainable improvements in the classroom (that come from the ground up, rather than from the top down).
Strategies for Effective Leadership in Professional Development
- Model Best Practices
Great middle leaders lead by example. Promoting a highly-effective professional learning culture by supporting colleagues to set goals, build understanding, develop skills and embed good classroom habits. And they do this by modelling it and sharing their own learning journey. - Facilitate Collaborative Learning
Professional development is not a solo sport – it should be a shared endeavour (and tends to be more effective when it is). Encouraging peer reflection and conversation, lesson reviews, team discussions and collaborative problem-solving can help middle leaders and their teams feel agency and ownership in their professional learning. And that is super-motivating! - Use Data to Inform Decisions
Evidence-based approaches are essential for targeted professional development. But where does good quality, relevant evidence come from? And what do we do with it? Analysing data from the classroom (for example: student survey data, teacher self-reflections, colleague observation data, achievement data) helps to create a rounded picture of reality, not the inevitably biased view that comes from just one source of information. - Create a Supportive Environment
Teachers – just like the learners in their care – are more likely to engage in professional development when they feel that . Middle leaders should foster a safe space for experimentation and feedback by adopting a ‘mentor mindset’ – one that has both high expectations and high support in equal measure. - Encourage Reflective Practice
Reflection is a powerful tool for professional growth. But when you only have one source of reflection (e.g. a colleague dropping into your lesson to see you teach), the reflection can be blurred, even completely inaccurate. So, using several sources of information to ‘hold a mirror’ up to teaching is super helpful, and something that middle leaders can both model and facilitate for their teams.
Overcoming Challenges
While middle leadership comes with its own set of challenges – time constraints, balancing teaching responsibilities, managing change (amongst others) – supporting colleagues’ professional development is a challenge that is worth the effort, because it’s the thing that will deliver greatest value to both teachers and learners. When middle leaders themselves truly believe in and prioritise high-quality, sustained professional development that helps teachers develop their knowledge, skill and judgement, amazing things can happen. When this belief is turbocharged with the right tools and training, extraordinary becomes possible.
What can senior leaders do?
Empowering middle leaders to become part of the engine room for professional development is key to developing a highly effective professional learning culture. But so is ensuring they have the bandwidth, the time and the tools to do this. Often, middle leaders need senior leaders to ‘clear a path’ for them to build the culture of professional learning – to de-implement some things to make time and space for professional learning. But when they do that, the potential for sustainable professional growth can become its own motivator.
Looking for a platform to foster collaboration? The Great Teaching Toolkit makes it easy to organise and focus how those teams of people work together on their development.
Find out more about Great Teaching Teams and development cycles here.
