What is a pedagogical leader

Usually and especially in the English speaking world the concept of pedagogical leadership is connected with upbringing and teaching young children, but at least in secondary level of schooling the word pedagogy is replaced with instruction and in literature scholars are writing about instructional leadership instead of pedagogical leadership when they mean teacher or student or learning related tasks of principals. So it is pedagogy if you refer early childhood education, but it is instruction if you refer educating students. However there is a fundamental distinction between the two concepts. Whereas instructional leadership focus on teachers, teaching, and try with proper instructions to alter students’ behavior, pedagogical leadership emphasizes collaboration in organization and focuses on students and learning. In other words, pedagogical leadership is based on dialogue, not monologue and the learners are essential participants in the discussion. Moreover it covers a wider range of aspects of the teaching act than instruction.

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Pedagogical leadership consists strategic elements which involve a wide set of stakeholders in pedagogical improvement. In his classical writing on pedagogical leadership, Sergiovanni (1998, p. 37) states that the inclusion of “visionary leadership” among bureaucratic functions and “entrepreneurial leadership” views are unsuccessful as strategies to gain change and better results in schools. Furthermore visionary or otherwise exceptional leaders are hard to find so “the hope of transforming schools through the actions of individual leaders is quickly fading” (Harris, Leithwood, Day, Sammons, & Hopkins 2007).  So to build a transformational organization needs cooperation of teachers. Also according to Sergiovanni pedagogical leadership is an alternative concept of leadership that aims to develop the human capital of schools, involving both teachers and learners (Sergiovanni 1998). Compared to instructional leadership, where the emphasis is on school management and there is an administrative aspect in charge and the school management is accountable to the provider or to the upper level of the administration, pedagogical leadership has the emphasis on building a professional learning community with prior accountability to the learners.

Although the term pedagogy is still relatively uncommon in the use of teaching in upper levels, but is currently being used more frequently in publications and teachers' discourse. According to MacNeill et al. (2005) there appears to be at least five, inter-related clusters of meaning of pedagogy in the literature: First there is an epistemological aspect  of pedagogy as the transmission of knowledge, second the socio-ideological aspect of pedagogy as a political tool for enculturating students, third a social aspect of pedagogy as social practice and as  a relationship that produces knowledge, fourth there is the pedagogic act, which consists the mechanical aspects of how knowledge is  transmitted and pedagogy as an inclusive view of all aspect teaching, but not simply instruction, and fifth there is pedagogy separated from didactics, the European view of culture and learning as didactics refer to the subjects to be taught.

Unlike instructional leadership, pedagogical leadership specifically recognizes the cultural, moral, and societal aspects of what is learned and why it is learned. Pedagogy acknowledges aspects of learning that were previously described as the hidden curriculum. Pedagogy peels back the veneer of teaching methodology to expose the conscious and unconscious decisions made by school leaders as the communities’ agents of enculturation. A pedagogical leader emphasizes distributed decision-making and acknowledges the fact that leader is not the only person, who has the expertise or facts in the particular organization.

REFERENCES

Harris, A., Leithwood, K., Day, C., Sammons, P., & Hopkins, D. (2007). Distributed leadership and organizational change: Reviewing the evidence. Journal of Educational Change, 8(4), 337-347.

MacNeill, H, Cavanagh, R.F. & Silcox, S. (2005).  Pedagogic Leadership: Refocusing on Lear­ning and Teaching. International Electronic Journal for Leadership in Learning 9 (2).

  

Sergiovanni, T. J. (1998). Leadership as pedagogy, capital development and school effectiveness. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 1(1), 37–46.