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Abstract
In this article we discuss how school leaders address challenges when implementing innovative international education curricula, namely International Baccalaureate (IB) programs. Specifically, we frame challenges in curriculum implementation of and transition between IB programs from a “disconnection” perspective. We have often noticed when innovative programs are parceled together without preparation and thrust at great speed at schools, they become disconnected. The hasty implementation of multiple IB programs simultaneously at a school also causes disconnection. Drawing on extensive interview data from principals, mid-level leaders, and teachers in five IB schools adopting multiple IB programs in Asia, we detail curriculum disconnection facing IB schools and how school leaders, including teacher leaders, address such challenges by weaving various disconnected points, namely instrumental, intellectual, cultural, professional, and communicative disconnections. Based on findings from the multisite case study, we argue that school leaders in the case of IB schools adopt a range of leadership strategies to weave disconnection points. We reframe the leadership strategies as two aspects of distributed leadership: distributed instructional leadership and teacher leadership. In conclusion, we suggest that a central facet for successful leadership of IB schools that adopt multiple IB programs is about finding, focusing, and facilitating ways to address disconnections in curriculum implementation of and transition between different IB programs.
Notes
1 Although not the focus of this paper, the IB Organisation also offers a more vocationally oriented “Career-Related Programme” for students aged 16–19.
2 We utilized the same data used in Hallinger, Walker, and Lee (Citation2010).
3 The IB Learner Profile is one of the core learning outcomes of the IB programs. It consists of ten attributes and/or descriptors (e.g., inquirers, open-mindedness, knowledgeable) that students are expected to develop through the IB programs (see IBO, Citation2010; Walker, Lee, & Bryant, Citation2016 for details).
4 The different perceptions suggest that the schools seemed to have different ways of enacting leadership practices. As Bryant, Walker, and Lee (Citation2017) report, “In the IB-focused school, the leaders fully adopted the official IB mission, philosophy, values, standards, and learning outcomes as the driver of all school programs and activities. In contrast, leaders in the IB-plus school viewed the IB programs as among a set of several tools that the school employed to accomplish its own mission” (p. 27).
5 In the case schools, school leaders valued pastoral support for students because school leaders perceived that the program transition is also social transition. To this end, they provided a more structured pastoral support for students. In the case of School 4, it provided adult advisors (all of them are teachers) within so-called house systems. Also, there was a position called a pastoral coordinator who supervises the overall advisory system (see Hallinger et al., Citation2010 for more examples).