Are You Leading, or Just Supporting? A Coordinator's Turning Point...

Are you leading the programme in your school — or are you supporting it?

That single question, posed during a session in the Role of the Coordinator workshop this past August, has stayed with me longer than almost anything else from the training. It's simple on the surface. But sit with it for a moment, as I did, and it starts to unsettle some assumptions you didn't know you were carrying.

Where I Started

For a long time, I believed my role as a PYP Coordinator was primarily about support. Supporting teachers through unit planning. Supporting the inquiry process. Being present, responsive, available — the person who smooths the path so the programme runs without friction. It felt like the right instinct. Humble, collaborative, teacher-centred. And in many ways, it is exactly the disposition the role demands.

But it's not the whole picture.

What the Workshop Actually Opened Up

The Role of the Coordinator is a Category 3 workshop, designed for experienced coordinators already working within established IB World Schools — which meant the sessions didn't linger on the basics. Instead, we moved quickly into the substance of the role: documentation and policy writing, curriculum mapping, the verification and evaluation process, resource and relationship management across a wide range of stakeholders, and the systems — IBIS, the programme resource centre — that quietly hold the whole structure together.

What struck me wasn't any single one of these components. It was the thread running underneath all of them: every one of these responsibilities exists in service of the IB mission and philosophy — not as an end in itself. Documentation isn't paperwork for its own sake. Stakeholder management isn't diplomacy for its own sake. Each is a lever a coordinator pulls to keep a whole community moving toward the same vision. And pulling levers, deliberately and with intention, is leadership — not support.

The Shift

I came away understanding that the role isn't support or leadership — it's a balance of both, held simultaneously. A coordinator stands as a bridge: between the school's management philosophy and vision on one side, and the faculty who bring that vision to life in the classroom every day on the other — accountable to every stakeholder along the way.

That reframing changed how I see the everyday parts of the job. A policy document isn't just a compliance requirement — it's a leadership decision about how the programme will hold together over time. A conversation with a hesitant teacher about the inquiry process isn't just support — it's a moment of steering the whole community back toward the mission. The tasks look the same from the outside. The intention behind them is what shifts.

It Looks Different Everywhere — and That's the Point

Every organization is shaped differently — by its size, its location, the culture of its stakeholders, the maturity of its programme. A coordinator in a newly candidate school is leading a very different set of conversations than one in a school twenty years into its authorization. But underneath all of that variation, the destination doesn't change: the coordinator's job is to lead the programme forward, in whatever shape that takes in their specific context.

Where This Leaves Me

I don't think I'll ever fully let go of the instinct to support — I don't think I should. It's part of what makes the role trustworthy to the people doing the daily work of teaching. But I'm no longer content to let "support" be the whole story I tell myself about this role. The workshop was, in many ways, an eye-opener: an invitation for coordinators to step fully into the weight and responsibility of leadership, rather than stay comfortably on its edges.

So the question I'll keep asking myself — and the one I'd leave with any coordinator reading this — isn't really "support or lead?" It's "where, today, does this programme need me to lead — and am I willing to do it?"