Curriculum Leadership in Elementary Schools: A Phenomenological Study of Grade-Level Coordinators

Curriculum leadership has emerged as an important area of educational leadership research, yet its conceptualization remains dispersed across curriculum studies, leadership theory, teacher agency, and professional identity research. This qualitative phenomenological study examines how elementary-school grade-level coordinators experience and enact curriculum leadership within a hybrid professional role located between classroom teaching and school-level leadership. Drawing on in-depth interviews and documentary materials from 11 female grade-level coordinators working in three public elementary schools in Israel, the study re-examines participants’ role perceptions and practices through four enduring dimensions of curriculum decision-making associated with Tyler’s rationale: educational purposes, learning experiences, organization, and evaluation. The analysis indicates that the coordinators exercise substantial curricular influence over educational purposes, learning experiences, and the organization of educational practice, while their authority over formal evaluation is more limited. Leadership is enacted predominantly through relational, participative, and situated forms of influence rather than through hierarchical authority, and its distribution is uneven across curriculum dimensions. The findings further reveal a tension between substantial educational responsibility and inconsistent formal recognition and decision-making authority. The article argues that curriculum leadership should be conceptualized not simply as leadership applied to curriculum, but as leadership constituted through curriculum decision-making. It proposes a differentiated understanding in which curriculum dimensions identify what is being led, leadership configurations identify how authority and influence are organized, and professional identity identifies the professional positioning enabled through participation in curriculum work.