The influence of the leadership styles on teacher communication-networking in subject teams: A Hong Kong perspective

The present study was originally designed to explore the impact of pedagogical innovation on teacher learning from 2003-2004 and was replicated in another elementary school in 2007. Previous papers that focused on interview and discourse data reported on the positive effects of teacher engagement on school-based curriculum development. The present study continues to use the discourse approach in the analysis of data from videotaped meetings among members of the English and General Studies curriculum development teams in the replication study. This work aims to show the critical features of the effects of leadership styles and power on the communication-networking systems of the two teams. The findings partially confirm the two modes of communication-networking systems, a restrictive and an extended model as observed in the previous study, which have different effects on the space for teacher learning. The latter extended model tends to allow a greater degree of qualitative teacher participation, while the former restricts teacher access to participation. A major implication is that an effective leadership program should aim at enhancing the capacities of the participants to create conditions that allow the emergence of the elaborated code of discourse in meetings and provide guidance toward the realization of innovations.