Geeta Motilal & Zakhele Mbokazi
School of Education
University of Witwatersrand
EMASA 2011 Cape Peninsula University of Technology
March 11-13
Context
 current leadership models may well be
inadequate in explaining the practices of
successful school leadership facing the
challenges of today’s schools.
 Past research : a principal as someone who
spends a lot of time solving instructional
problems in the school, and whose
performance in solving those problems has a
tangible effect on the results of the students at
the school.
Challenges
 difficulties that school leaders in challenging
contexts face - focus on solving instructional
problems may not show the extent to which
successful leaders also have to set direction and
model values and practices consistent with the
contextual variables of the school.
Intro……
The core purpose of principalship :
 is to provide leadership and management in the school
 a high quality teaching and learning takes place
 promote the highest possible learner achievement in any
context
 creation of a safe, nurturing and supportive learning
environment
 effective teaching and learning to take place.
The South African Standard for Principalship, 2005.
Definition of Instructional
leadership
 Bush and Glover’s (2003) - actions directly related to
teaching and learning such as classroom supervision,
whereas a broader view incorporates all leadership
activities that affect student learning
 Hallinger and Murphy (1985) state that instructional
leadership comprises three broad categories:
 defining the school mission,
 managing the instructional programme and
 promoting school climate
Key Question
 “How do South African school principals manage
teaching and learning in different social contexts?”
Introduction
 Bush and Glover, 2003) instructional leadership is
a very important dimension of leadership because
it targets the school’s central activities, teaching
and learning.
Definition
 Hallinger and Murphy: three broad
categories:
 defining the school mission,
 managing the instructional programme and
 promoting school climate
 Leithwood (1994) heavy classroom focus, it
does not address “second order changes”,
such as organization building
shows signs of being a dying paradigm
Problem statement
leadership models may be
inadequate in explaining the
practices of successful school
leadership facing the challenges of
today’s schools (Day et al, 2000)
South African research
Kruger (1992- five functions of IL)
1. Defining and communicating a clear
mission, goals and objectives
2. Managing curriculum and instruction
3. Supervising teachers
4. Monitoring learner progress
5. Promoting instructional climate
Question
 How can leaders across the length and breadth of our
country whose schools failure are based on narrow
test-based measures of student achievement, chair a
meeting of a parent advisory council, work with a
unionised labour workforce, walk through the
corridors of a school and enter a classroom without
coming face-to face with growing diversity, multiple
and conflicting goals, changing realities, competing
values and alternate perspectives on the purpose and
aims of education today?
Questions
 How can any education department and
leadership argument assert that these realities are
irrelevant or peripheral to the work of school
leaders?
 What is the “real” work of the educational leader
that does not affect teaching and learning?
 Can instructional leadership be successful without
this work taking place?
Purpose
 The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the
necessity of paying explicit attention to the complex
issues of our time, and of leading with vision, integrity,
and moral purpose in order to ensure that public
education opens doors of opportunity and windows of
understanding to all students in our diverse and multicultural school communities.
 We discuss three issues which we considered
important but were not included in the literature that
was reviewed.
Weber’s framework (1996)
 Defining the School’s Mission
 Managing Curriculum and Instruction
 Promoting a Positive Learning Climate
 Observing and Improving Instruction
 Assessing the Instructional Program
.
Issues
Three issues that this paper seeks to highlight are:
1. The first issue of conceptual and methodological
considerations
2. The second issue is that of the relationship
between instructional leadership and school
outcomes
3. The third issue is that of context-sensitivity.
Conceptual and methodological
considerations
 Heck (1996) proposes first to identify some of the salient
conceptual and methodological issues involved in cross-cultural
research
 Heck (1996) notes that while there have been periodic calls for
comparative work in educational leadership, few empirical
studies have been designed specifically to compare principal
leadership practices between contextual and cultural settings.
 Heck suggests that conducting such studies raises several
conceptual and methodological problems with respect to
underlying assumptions about knowledge, appropriate
conceptualizations of principal leadership, and methods of
inquiry.
“space” and “performance”
 South African studies, Fataar (2007) uses the
lenses of ‘space’ and ‘performance’ to analyse what
he calls “the pedagogical practices” (p.5) of three
principals in a South African township. As
problematic as the term ‘pedagogical’ might be,
Fataar labels principals’ spatially engaged practices
in this township as Area of investigation
Relationship between
instructional leadership and
school outcomes
Context-sensitivity
Conclusion
 a model of effective instructional leadership in
schools. Weber’s instructional leadership framework
was explored.
 not been empirically tested - not clear that if a
principal demonstrates behaviours from Weber’s
model, high levels of student achievement will result.
 Weber’s framework does not and cannot identify the
specific needs of each context.
 instructional leadership models have assumed
characteristics which can be modelled or check-listed.
In closing
 This paper has argued that many reviews have
thrived on assumptions about the applicability of
instructional leadership models in various
contexts. Insofar as the sources identified for this
paper are concerned, the challenge was accessing
the South African research domain on
instructional leadership.
Thank you