Practising educational leading ‘in’ and ‘from’ the middle: a site ontological view of best practice
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, a site ontological approach to practice seeks to understand how educational development can be accomplished through the practices of ‘middle leaders’ - educators who exercise their leading ‘between’ the principal and the teaching staff. Analysis of two vignettes of leading in extraordinary circumstances untangles the web of interrelationships, conditions and practices that comprise middle leading in schools. The discussion focuses on how middle leaders' practices are enabled and constrained by practice architectures, and how their leading is ecologically arranged with other educational practices present. It is argued that notions of ‘best practice’ are an idealised but erroneous myth that often provokes educational development to be practised in homogenised or pre-packaged ways that do not necessarily serve the needs and interests of schools. We conclude by suggesting that best practice might be better conceptualised as site based practices, uniquely realised in response to local issues and concerns.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it