Middle leadership in schools has gained increasing attention as a key mechanism for mediating instructional improvement and supporting teachers’ professional learning under intensified global accountability demands over the past decades (Fullan, 2015; Harris et al., 2019; Harris & Jones, 2017). These developments have positioned instruction-based middle leaders in a crucial role for school-based improvement (Shaked, 2023). Within this broader international trend, the concept of middle leadership is emerging in the Chinese secondary school context and has been institutionalised through the introduction of an instruction-based role, the Teaching Research Group (TRG) leader. Teachers appointed into these positions are formally responsible for coordinating subject-based instructional work and teachers’ professional learning within their curriculum area expertise.

In the context of the Chinese educational system, TRG leaders are widely recognised for their positive impact on effective teaching and learning. Curriculum-focused TRGs operate as the key mechanism for Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) in Chinese schools, serving as a significant platform for teachers to refine classroom practice and engage in ongoing professional learning (Chen & Zhang, 2022). Situated in a school-based management model shaped by hierarchical norms, TRG leaders exert their influence within a predominantly top-down organisational structure (Lo, 2019). In practice, their work centres on collaborating and supporting colleagues to strengthen instructional and professional growth, while also modelling effective classroom teaching (Tang et al., 2022).

Although recent policies (MoE, 2019) have highlighted the pivotal role of TRG leaders in enhancing teaching quality and organising activities to support teachers’ professional development, there is limited empirical research evidence in the Chinese literature related to the implementation of the TRG leader’s position and any impact on teachers’ effectiveness or student outcomes, particularly in less developed regions of China . This study involved an in-depth investigation into the role of TRG leaders in an underdeveloped area of China (including rural areas), encompassing their conceptualisation, implementation strategies and approaches to teacher development. Based on the data analysis, it was evident that TRG leaders’ role conception remained contested at both the policy and practice levels. The absence of an explicit role description and clearly defined responsibilities at the local and school level has generated divergent interpretations and expectations of TRG leadership within schools. More specifically, TRG leaders were found to serve as administrative organisers who maintain teaching routines and collective activities in a stable, predictable manner within daily practice, reflecting senior leaders’ and some teachers’ expectations that collaboration will translate into pedagogical improvement. Nevertheless, TRG leaders frequently resist being characterised as “leaders,” given their constrained mandate for decision-making and limited formal authority within the school context.

Although TRGs were commonly recognised as leaders of site-based professional learning for teachers (Thurlings et al., 2015), the scope of this role was shaped by the logistics of the wider accountability environment. However, TRG leaders routinely organised collective activities to foster teachers’ growth, and shared instructional practices to facilitate the exchange of practice-based, transferable strategies that supported student learning. In a high-stakes examination system, professional learning was often subordinated to a focus on learning for summative assessment, potentially narrowing what counts as legitimate inquiry and limiting deeper learning.

This study is situated within a constructivist-interpretivist paradigm, acknowledging that leadership is not a fixed set of behaviours but a socially constructed, context-sensitive process shaped by the beliefs, interactions, policy and institutional environments of those involved (Creswell & Creswell, 2017; Patton, 2014). A qualitative multi-case study design was adopted to investigate how TRG leaders understood and enacted their leadership roles across different school settings. This approach enabled the researcher to explore variations in leadership conceptions and practices, while remaining sensitive to contextual and cultural dynamics (Creswell & Creswell, 2017; Patton, 2014). The study was conducted in three secondary schools, purposefully selected from an underdeveloped region in the southwest of mainland China, including urban, semi-rural, and rural contexts. Data were collected through observations of teacher meetings led by TRG leaders, semi-structured interviews with TRG leaders, subject teachers who reported to those TRG leaders, and senior leaders who managed them. The participant recruitment sample included nine TRG leaders from the subjects of Chinese, mathematics and English because of their central role in the school curriculum. Nine teachers (3 from each school) and three senior leaders (1 from each school) were also recruited to provide a range of perspectives on the effectiveness of the TRG leadership role. This study was conducted in two sequential phases to operationalise this research design. Adopting a non-participant stance, the researcher observed a total of 11 TRG meetings across the three schools, covering collective lesson preparation, assessment analysis, and demonstration lessons. After the observation sessions, semi-structured interviews were conducted with each of the nine TRG leaders to deeply explore their own conceptions, perceived affordances and challenges. Phase Two broadened the analytic lens by conducting semi-structured interviews with senior leaders and subject teachers to compare understanding of TRG leadership from diverse perspectives within and across school types. Given the study’s interpretive orientation, reflexive thematic analysis (TA) (Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2021) provided a flexible analytical framework for identifying patterns of meaning across diverse participant roles and school types. A hybrid approach combining inductive and deductive methods was employed to establish useful theoretical frameworks responsive to context-specific realities encountered within the Chinese secondary school context.

This study contributed to developing understanding of middle leadership in Chinese secondary schools by focusing on the pivotal role of Teaching Research Group (TRG) leaders. By identifying key leadership practices enacted by TRG leaders and evaluating their impact on teachers’ professional learning and development, the study provided empirical evidence to critique this government initiative inform the development of school policies, leadership training programs, and professional development strategies to strengthen leadership capacity and capability within schools. The findings suggest that TRG leadership is enacted by a complex interplay of role expectations, organisational routines, relational work, and system-level improvement pressures. These dynamics position TRG leaders as both facilitators of collaborative professional learning and mediators of accountability demands, highlighting the tensions inherent in instruction-based middle leadership roles. Such insights deepen understandings of how middle leadership operates in practice, particularly within systems characterised by strong academic performance orientations. With a deeper understanding of how TRG leaders enhance classroom teaching and learning outcomes, this study enabled the researcher to develop a strategic framework to advance educators’ professional capacity within the Chinese secondary school system. While the qualitative multi-case design limits statistical generalisability, the study offers transferable concepts that can inform leadership development in comparable contexts. Future research could build on these findings through larger-scale, longitudinal, and cross-system comparative studies to further examine how instructional middle leadership is shaped by differing governance and accountability conditions. By contributing a contextually grounded account from China, this study extends international discussions of instructional middle leadership and provides comparative insights of relevance to scholars and practitioners across diverse education systems.

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