A Content Analysis of Secondary School Department Leader Position Descriptions: Implications for Teacher Leadership

Introduction

Teacher leaders may have the title of department chair, department head, lead teacher, department coordinator, or similar title. This study addresses a gap in the research literature on department leader roles in reference to their official job descriptions. This content analysis features a sample (n = 8) of secondary school department leader job descriptions to compare understanding of the change and continuity in the role of the secondary school department chair. The guiding research questions examined in this study are: (1) What are the common themes across secondary school department leader position descriptions? (2) Are there apparent differences in position descriptions depending on the department leader’s content area? After the findings to the guiding research questions based on the content analysis in this study, are two questions addressed in the literature review and discussion: (1) What are department leaders’ management role? (2) Where are department leaders situated for collaborating between teacher colleagues and school-level administrators?

This content analysis suggests that department chairs often share in administrative responsibilities that make department leaders mid-level managers and, as such, department chairs are teacher leaders who are equivalent to assistant principals in their influence on curriculum development and learning measurement (Bartanen et al., 2021; Ghamrawi, 2013). Generally, instructional leadership is a primary role for the department chair (Peacock, 2014). Instructional leadership includes managing their department’s curriculum within and across grade levels, coordinating curriculum assessment in their content area, and maintaining communication with school administrators as a representative for both their department teacher colleagues and for the principal simultaneously. For some department chairs, they also have the responsibility to evaluate their teacher colleagues on an annual basis, and their evaluations go in teacher colleagues’ personnel file, which suggests a mid-level managerial role.

Additionally, the concept of role ambiguity is reevaluated in this study because this concept was historically a topic in the literature on secondary school department leaders (Bliss et al., 1996; Mayers & Zepeda, 2002). Role ambiguity means that the department leader may have substantially different roles depending on the school and so there can be a lack of clarity for this type of leadership position. Role ambiguity can be mitigated when the principal delegates authority to the department leaders (Ghamrawi, 2013; Lee & Nie, 2014), but this suggested a question about official responsibilities of department leaders as delegation of authority tends to depend on the principal. In this study, it is posited that role ambiguity is not as relevant anymore because of recent emphasis on job description standardization trends for department chairs. Findings in this study suggest that the concept of role ambiguity is either not relevant in most cases or less relevant now. It now seems to be more a question of role expansion rather than role ambiguity. As such, the concept of distributed leadership is central to this discussion. Findings are explored for how distributed leadership applies across school types.