Education leadership practices
Focussed school-wide inquiry is a powerful way for school leaders to engage staff and make a difference for students’ learning outcomes.
By Cathie Johnson
Focussed school-wide inquiry is a powerful way for school leaders to engage staff and make a difference for students’ learning outcomes.
Middle-level leaders in schools have a critical role in mentoring teachers as they work with the teaching-as-inquiry process. One-to-one interactions and professional conversations with each teacher largely determine the quality of inquiry, both for an individual teacher and on a school-wide basis. In this article, an experienced senior secondary school leader explores the conditions necessary for school-wide inquiry to flourish, and explains why mentorship needs to be valued and to operate at a range of levels within the school if effective inquiry is to be initiated and sustained.
A lot of emphasis is currently placed on the need for principals to be instructional leaders or leaders of learning. In the study of the instructional leadership of secondary principals reported in this article, the authors argue that instructional leadership can be both direct and indirect. Direct instructional leadership is focused on the quality of teacher practice itself, whereas indirect instructional leadership creates the conditions for good teaching.
