Being and Becoming a Middle Leader: Journeying into the Space of Leading

This chapter focuses on middle leading and how it evolved through the professional life journey of a group of teachers who had participated in action research. Leading professional learning in schools is a professional education practice that involves both teaching students in classrooms and leading school-based professional learning, often through facilitating long term action research projects. Specifically, the chapter considers how teachers journeyed into this space of middle leading, an impetus triggered by their own dispositions, commitment to developing education as a societal good, and importantly, their own professional development experiences in action research. For them, learning to lead was found in learning to learn. The chapter represents a coherent view of the experiences and practices of these educators who, by their commitment to learning, inhabited their professional space in a different way as each moved into a middle leading role. According to these teachers, their own participation experiences in action research redefined their professional trajectories. In retracing their own professional histories, becoming a middle leader seemed to flow from facilitation and mentoring practices that strengthened their own personal teaching know-how, their capacity to critically reflect on and articulate (justify and reason) professional understandings, and encouraged an individual and collective responsibility to learn and lead. Over time, such practices unearthed in these teachers, a deeper personal and interpersonal confidence that set leading in motion. Action research led them to their educational leading place, ultimately shifting their identities as educators.