This study was originally designed to explore the impact of a distributed approach to developing curriculum leadership among schoolteachers. Previous papers have focused on reporting evidence of teacher learning in the process of engaging teachers in various types of curriculum decision-making in an innovation project based on interview data. This article reports a discourse analysis of the interactions based on the visual data in videotaped meetings between teachers in a Chinese curriculum development team and shows that teacher participation is constrained by the leadership styles of the positional leaders in the team in the second action cycle in the project. The mediational effects of the leadership styles invite policy-makers and school management to rethink the effectiveness of school-based approaches to curriculum development in enhancing teacher learning and development. (Contains 2 tables and 3 figures.)