Leading the Quality of Teaching within Schools

This chapter examines the cunent challenges faced by Australian school leaders in developing high quality teaching within their schools and the strategies and mechanisms for them to be addressed. It presents some fmdings from recent research which explored, through qualitative case study, how successful school leadership in two improving Australian seconda1y schools was understood and enacted in ways which initiated and maintained quality teaching.

There is considerable research and literature examining leadership and quality teaching, including various models, frames and typologies. Despite some notable Australian contributions (e.g., Caldwell & Ranis, 2008; Silins & Mulford, 2002), there remains a paucity of Australian educational leadership research for Australian educators and scholars. In particular, the cunent study was unable to locate relevant Australian based case study which examined how successful school leadership influenced emerging conceptions of quality teaching, where quality teaching is viewed within the frame of teacher professionalism comprising various teacher capacity domains or capitals (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012). The cunent study extended Australian research to an exploration of how leadership influenced the quality of teaching within the whole school and the mechanisms that may have facilitated change.