Effective School leadership, commonly made up of middle leaders and senior leaders, is seen as a key element of successful schools in the first decades of the 21st century. The scope of this paper is the professional performance of educational middle leaders, regarded as the school practitioners who often can best impact the learning outcomes of students for having a direct influence on teachers and classroom teaching. This paper has derived from a qualitative educational case study whose unit of analysis was a team of middle leaders responsible for the lower elementary school division of a private school located in Brazil. The academic dissertation was carried out by the same researcher within the timeframe of 2021-2022 and underpinned by a set of research questions that included one concerning “how middle leaders should be best supported by their senior leaders” towards achieving their full potential in their workplace. The purpose of this manuscript is to outline how the topic was approached in the empiric study. Through an electronic questionnaire and semi-structured individual face-to-face interviews, whilst being endorsed by a robust body of literature, it has been possible to find out evidence that senior leaders should support their middle leaders in specific ways, such as by ‘formalizing their middle leadership positions across the school community’, ‘having their roles and responsibilities well-defined’, ‘keeping an effective communication with them’, and ‘providing them with full support’ through ‘identifying and meeting their developmental needs’ – which would likely be achieved with a structured professional development programme.

Author: Elaine Aaltonen

Published in: London International Conference on Education (LICE-2023)

• Date of Conference: 13-15 November 2023
• DOI: 10.20533/LICE.2023.0020
• ISBN: 978-1-913572-66-2
• Conference Location: St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK