It is well established that middle leaders make a difference in school development (Edwards-Groves et al., 2019) but understanding their specific leading practices has remained less clear, particularly of those middle leaders who have both teaching and leading responsibilities in schools (Grootenboer et al., 2014, 2020). This paper examines the efficacy of dialogue conferences employed as a participatory approach to supporting middle leaders’ professional learning in a four-year research project investigating middle leaders practices in Australian schools. Dialogue conferences, also known as research circles or study circles, is a methodology rooted in Scandinavian traditions of democracy, collaboration and inclusion (Löfqvist et al., 2019; Rönnerman & Olin, 2012). In this study, dialogue conferences involving middle leaders were used as a collaborative approach for determining the day-to-day practices middle leaders enact when supporting teaching change in their schools. The dialogue conferences had three interrelated purposes: i) member checking, ii) professional learning and dissemination, and iii) data gathering. In this presentation, we focus on the first and second purposes to discuss ways dialogic conferences created conditions which validated the work of middle leaders and simultaneously promoted robust engagement in professional conversations and extended knowledge about nature of middle leading roles and responsibilities. Deductive thematic analysis, using the theory of practice architectures as an analytical framework, showed how participating in the dialogue conferences enabled middle leaders to enter and engage in a democratic dialogic space that valued different ideas, practices, experiences and opinions (Bahktin, 1981). Participants attributed value in the activities (guided, but not governed, by the researchers) that explored their understandings about their own leading practices; and, according to participants, to ‘challenge theoretical thinking’, ‘broaden understanding of professional practices’, ‘boost to confidence in using existing ideas about middle leading work’ and to ‘introduce a valuable new, expanded lexicon about middle leading practices’. To conclude, the dialogue conferences created cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements that enabled middle leader participants to (a) extol the value of encouraging dialogue about their different leading practices; and (b) be reflexively encouraged the develop intersubjective understandings about their own ideas, presuppositions, knowledge and practices. Responding to Forde et al’s (2019) call for focused professional development for middle leaders, results demonstrate the value of dialogue conferences for rigorous intellectual engagement and knowledge generation.

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