A mirroring process: From school management team cooperation to teacher collaboration

The importance of expanding the leadership capacity of schools as a means of supporting education reform has been recognized by school system globally over the past decade. This has Ied to an intensified focus on school-based management, teacher leadership, distributed leadership, and shared leadership as potentially efficacious approaches to achieving this goal. This has been the case as well in Hong Kong where the formal adoption of school based management over a decade ago has Ied to the use of ‘school management teams’ as a vehicle for leading schools. In this study, we examine how levels of cooperation and constructive controversy evidenced within school management teams (SMT) relate to a broader levels of collaboration among teachers. Dyad survey data was collected from SMT members and teachers at 32 primary schools in Hong Kong. Results of multilevel regression analysis indicated that cooperation among members in these SMTs was positively related to levels of teacher collaboration. Moreover, the use of constructive controversy within SMTs mediated the path and contributed additional variance explained to the level of school-wide teacher collaboration. These findings affirm that the leadership dynamics of School Management Teams in Hong Kong primary schools do appear to have a positive influence on potentially important school level conditions. Notably the findings are also consistent with findings from similar studies of senior management teams in private sector organizations in China. If substantiated in further studies, the results suggest that investments in building broader leadership capacity in Hong Kong’s schools are achieving some system-level goals.