Instructional leadership practices in challenging school contexts

Abstract

There is growing scholarship that links high quality leadership of the school principal with positive learner outcomes. In South Africa there is a growing cohort of disadvantaged schools, which, despite the socio-economic challenges they face, display a great degree of resilience and perform at levels comparable to the advantaged schools. The purpose of our study was to explore school principals’ instructional leadership practices in high performing schools in challenging contexts. In order to do this we drew on theories of instructional leadership. Methodologically, we employed a qualitative approach. We purposively sampled the Umlazi District in the province of KwaZulu-Natal where we interviewed the principals at five schools. In order to triangulate the data generated from the school principals, we also interviewed the circuit managers of the selected school principals. The findings seem to indicate that a distributed form of instructional leadership is prevalent in these schools. There is strong emphasis on academic success. The human resources at the school are viewed as assets. Time is greatly valued and maximally utilised. Further, there is a strong focus on improving the quality of the inputs so as to ensure quality outputs. Our learnings from this study point to a rethinking of instructional leadership practices, which should be about shaping structures and cultures of the school in response to the realities of the ecology of the school community.