Educational leadership in collegial decision-making? How course leaders and teachers participate and influence decisions in planning meetings

Although decision-making is central to development and change in higher education, few studies unpack how leadership is enacted and negotiated in situ in collegial planning tasks where decisions are at stake. This article addresses this gap in educational leadership by examining influencing work in decision-making processes at a Swedish university. It explores educational leadership in course-planning meetings with course leaders and teachers. The empirical material consists of video recordings of meetings from two teams with challenging conditions: not only was the data recorded during the pandemic, but the teams also had a high teacher turnover. Drawing on the tradition of leadership-in-interaction, this article explores educational leadership in meeting interaction by illustrating and contrasting how course supervisors and teachers participate in and influence decision-making on pedagogic and didactic designs.Analyses of empirical episodes show how team members struggle to find common ground in the past and formulate decision proposals for educational change in backward- and forward-looking cycles. A key finding is how the trajectory of decision-making processes differs between the studied teams. The article discusses high teacher mobility as an organizational constraint that limits the collective competence of course teams, providing problematic conditions for smooth decision-making and, thus, educational change and leadership. This constraint places a heavy burden on course leaders to navigate ambiguities of knowledge, power, and emotion in interaction that highlight underlying assumptions about the course leader’s role as a collegial leader without managerial decision-making power.