Pedagogical leadership is increasingly emphasised in education policies and leadership standards. Yet conceptualisations of pedagogy and pedagogical leadership vary, from a focus on compliance that operationalises the role of formal school leaders, through to notions of pedagogical leadership as a praxis-oriented practice. This paper focuses on pedagogical leading practices in school settings in Sweden and Australia. Utilising the theory of practice architectures, it explores how historical notions of pedagogical leadership have changed over time in the two countries.

Findings show that there are different depths of pedagogical understanding and differences between understandings of individual and collective pedagogy in policy, school leadership and practice in Australia. The traditional way of understanding pedagogical leadership in Sweden is being challenged with ideas that focus on efficiency and student outcomes and where the school’s principal is foremost seen as the school’s pedagogical leader. There is a decentering of pedagogy in both countries in which pedagogy is viewed as a model of individual attainment over the collective moral responsibility of education.

Both cases raise questions about the state of educational leadership and pedagogical leadership globally and the decentering of pedagogy from students, the ultimate purpose of pedagogical practice. Educators need to reclaim the original meaning of pedagogy in order to reclaim the core purpose of education for shaping human society. How pedagogy and pedagogical leadership is understood in context will determine the extent to which they are seen as praxis-oriented practices. Properly understanding pedagogy is one way of decentring the popular role title ‘pedagogical leader’.