The Middle Leaders Project

S01E05: From Teacher to Head of Department, with Dhiv Sri Summary: Zac talks with Dhiv Sri, a head of science in the Pilbara, about moving from classroom teacher to leading a department. They cover leading people who used to be your peers, letting go of micromanaging, moving from systems to strategy, and what Dhiv says is the hardest part of the job: human communication. It is for middle leaders,...

Summary This episode is on Teacher professional learning and development, a 2008 booklet by Helen Timperley that summarises a New Zealand Ministry of Education research synthesis of 97 studies. Zac treats its ten principles, which sit on four understandings and join up in one cycle, as a heuristic for effective teacher improvement and a way to bring good practice back to conscious competence. He c...

Summary This episode is part two on Making Time for Great Teaching, a 2022 guide for principals from the Grattan Institute. It covers Section 3, helping teachers work smarter, and Section 4, reorganising teachers’ work, with a quick look at Section 5. Zac looks at shared lesson resources, how a team can define what is critical, where teachers can still explore and what to stop, and what middle lea...

S01E02: Fewer Priorities, Better Use of Support Staff Summary This episode covers the first half of Making Time for Great Teaching, a 2022 guide for principals from the Grattan Institute. It looks at why picking one or two priorities protects time for teaching, and how a school can use its wider team so teachers can focus on teaching. Zac asks what a middle leader can take from a guide written for...

This episode works through Trust in Schools, a 2003 article by Anthony Bryk and Barbara Schneider. Their main idea is that leading change is heavily influenced by relational trust. Zac covers the four parts of that trust, then looks at what building it takes when you are a middle leader with a small team, limited formal authority and a teaching load. It is for middle leaders, and people heading fo...

Being a middle leader means answering to two or more groups who sometimes want different things. This is the introduction to the Middle Leaders Project podcast. Zac, a public school middle leader in Western Australia, describes the tension he feels between supporting his executive team to deliver change and supporting the teachers in his team, who are doing their best work and sometimes need more...

In the first episode of Middle Leaders Project, Zac introduces the podcast and the gap it exists to fill. If you are somewhere between classroom teacher and formal middle leader, you have probably noticed that most leadership development is either aimed at people further along than you, or it feels abstract and disconnected from the actual work. This episode explores why that gap exists, what actu...

In the first episode of Middle Leaders Project, Zac introduces the podcast and the gap it exists to fill. If you are somewhere between classroom teacher and formal middle leader, you have probably noticed that most leadership development is either aimed at people further along than you, or it feels abstract and disconnected from the actual work. This episode explores why that gap exists, what actu...