Professional Learning Flagship Program: Leading Curriculum Change

A range of specifications and standards of teacher leadership roles and capacities has been createdin recent years, and a summary of the components can be seen in Table 3. There is a reasonableconsensus around the importance of these standards, and any program in learning for leadership shouldinclude them.However, even these capacities do not guarantee success unless the context allows them to be applied.For instance, Muijs and Harris (2006, p. 961) identified conditions which they said were required forsuccessful teacher leadership, including ‘a culture of trust and support, structures that supported teacherleadership but were clear and transparent, strong leadership, with the head usually being the originatorof teacher leadership, and engagement in innovative forms of professional development’.A corollary of the importance of context is that it has the potential to undermine teacher leadership incertain circumstances. Teacher leadership presents challenges by virtue of the institutional contextand the history of bureaucratic control of schools. For instance, Scribner and Bradley-Levine’s (2010,p. 491) study of teacher leadership found that the cultural conditions of the school influence teachers’construction of leadership, and that:... teachers’ construction of teacher leadership was connected to positional or personal powerlegitimized by particular institutional, organizational, and sociocultural rules. These rules wererelated to the value of content area expertise, organizational positions and accolades, andgendered notions of leadership practice.It follows that curriculum leaders need the organisational, political and interpersonal skills to deal withobstacles which might arise from institutional, organisational and sociocultural rules.25 Professional Learning Flagship Program: Leading Curriculum Change: Literature Review