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Instructional Leadership in Schools:

Reflections and empirical evidence
Geoff Southworth
School Leadership and Management, 2002, 22(1), 73–91

In this paper, Southworth promotes the concept of ‘instructional leadership’ and the need to
create ‘learning and teaching schools’ by:
• reviewing current understandings of school leadership
• reviewing definitions of instructional leadership
• examining two empirical studies which contain descriptions of what instructional leadership
looks like in practice
• drawing out the organisational conditions in which instructional leadership flourishes

Key findings
• Current research on leadership is over prescriptive, fails to take variations between schools
into account, lacks description of effective practice and tends to focus heavily on leadership
of under-performing or struggling schools.
• The main tension in the leadership role is that between chief executive and lead
professional.
• Commentators on leadership favour a broad approach which encompasses issues such as
whole-school culture rather than focusing exclusively on classroom practice.
• Interaction is at the heart of effective leadership with good instructional leaders realising that
most teachers expand their teaching range only with carefully designed support and
assistance.
• For interaction to be effective, leaders need a range of expertise, from classroom
observation and data gathering, to awareness of the teacher’s stage of development, and
reflective communication skills.
• Effective instructional leaders learn most by ‘doing the job’ and understand the curriculum,
pedagogy, student and adult learning.
• Effective organisational conditions for instructional leadership include a teacher-culture of
collaboration enquiry into pupils’ perspectives on their own learning and provision of multiple
opportunities for teacher mentoring, coaching and school based professional development.

© National College for School Leadership 2003 1

The research base: what does research about school leadership look
like?
Southworth argues that research on school leadership has so far delivered less than its
potential, for several reasons:
• A tendency to over-focus on leadership in the context of improving poorly performing
schools.
• Little regard for the variety of schools (size, type, gender of the leader, the true locus of
leadership within the school, changes over time). Moreover, as leadership is socially
constructed, the very concept could be expected to vary from setting to setting.
• A tendency for the research to offer taxonomies of what leadership entails. Such lists, he
argues, fragment the work of leaders, and fail to recognise that school leaders do many
things at once, their work characterised by simultaneity and holism. He also points to the
significant element of tension and dilemma inherent in the leader's role, further undermining
any rule-book or recipe approach.

Perhaps the major tension in the role is that between ‘chief executive’ and ‘leading professional’.
In the early 1990s in the UK, the emphasis was on the managerial challenges of devolution.
Now, the ‘leading professional’ role has again been placed at the heart of school leadership. Yet
again, though, contemporary research is more likely to offer prescriptions for instructional
leadership than to describe it.

What is instructional leadership? Three views

Southworth turns to three USA reviews for their perspectives on the nature and focus of
instructional leadership.
Leithwood, Jantzi and Steinbach (1999) identify instructional leadership as that which “assumes
that the critical focus for attention by leaders is the behaviour of teachers as they engage in
activities directly affecting the growth of students”. They further identify two variants: the narrow,
which restricts its focus to teacher behaviours which enhance pupil learning and the broader
type which focuses additionally on other organisational variables such as school culture which
the leadership believes influences teacher behaviour. Leithwood and his colleagues also note
that principals alone cannot fulfil all of a school’s needs for instructional leadership.
Hallinger and Heck (1997) identify the impact of leadership, both in terms of category:
• defining school mission
• managing the instructional programme
• promoting the school climate

and in terms of mode of impact:

• direct
• mediated
• reciprocal

They conclude that a primary avenue of influence lies in the shaping of the school’s direction
through vision, mission and goals, and suggest that the broader approach is more effective
because it encompasses the indirect as well as the direct impacts, and is also more likely to

© National College for School Leadership 2003 2

encourage others to share the responsibilities of instructional leadership (the narrower approach
tends conversely to foster the notion of heroic leadership).
Blase and Blase’s Handbook of Instructional Leadership: how really good principals promote
teaching and learning (1998) is summarised separately as part of the resources presented to the
National College for School Leadership (NCSL). In his paper, Southworth highlights their finding
that instructional leaders value a blend of supervision, staff development and curriculum
development. Within their institutions, the promotion of teachers’ professional development was
seen to be the most influential practice. Southworth notes that, as with the other two studies he
describes, Blase and Blase favour a broader approach to instructional leadership.

Instructional leadership in practice: the evidence base

Southworth then seeks to add to the limited store of empirical evidence – of description – of
instructional leadership. First, he outlines Blase and Blase’s analysis of 800 USA teachers’
accounts of their own principal’s positive and negative characteristics, and their views of how
those characteristics affected their performance as teachers. From this, emerged three aspects
of effective instructional leadership:
• talking with teachers
• promoting teachers’ professional growth
• fostering teacher reflection

These were tied to headteachers’ behaviour in terms of:

• being visible
• praising results
• extending autonomy

At the heart of all this is the matter of interaction, with good instructional leaders realising that
“most teachers expand their teaching range only with carefully designed support and assistance”
(Blase and Blase, 1998).
That vital interaction was seen to demand a range of expertise from the principal, from
classroom observation and data gathering, to awareness of the teacher’s stage of development,
and reflective communication skills. The Blases’ note that developing evidence-informed
approaches to leadership, management and school improvement requires concomitant
developments in leaders’ skills in handling data, colleagues and teaching and learning. They
also note that such leadership needs to be designed as part of the school’s organisational
structures and processes – for the school to become a learning community.
Southworth’s own study drew on the experience of the headteacher, two teachers and one
governor in each of 10 relatively small primary schools in England. He found a high level of
consensus about six ingredients of school leadership:
• working hard, as a matter of course
• determination – resolution to secure the best for the school, and an intolerance for poor
teaching conditions
• positive disposition, believing the school deserves, and will achieve success
• approachability
• valuing a teamwork approach
• school improver, whether the school is performing badly or well

© National College for School Leadership 2003 3

A variety of approaches to improving the quality of teaching and learning was encountered, but
three stood out:
• modelling, with heads using their own teaching, and even assemblies, as an example, and
working alongside staff in classrooms
• monitoring, with heads looking at teachers’ weekly plans and pupils’ work, and reviewing test
data
• professional dialogue, taking all opportunities in staff meetings, developing curricular
policies, reviewing pupil data, to probe teachers’ assumptions and to promote ideas

Southworth also noted that all these strategies were complemented in school structures and
systems – policies, schemes of work – which reinforced the head’s educational messages and
expectations. “The effect of their direct and indirect effects also creates a teacher culture
characterised by professional collaboration and professional learning.”
Both studies (Blase and Blase, and Southworth’s own) show a high degree of consistency, and
both feature prominently the process of professional dialogue. Southworth argues, however, that
the empirical base is low, and many more studies of instructional leadership are needed.
He concludes with reflections on:
• how instructional leadership is developed
• the organisational conditions for instructional leadership
• how school leaders should be used to promote learning organisations outside the world of
education

How instructional leadership is developed: messages emerging from

the literature
School leaders giving thought to develop ‘learning schools’ may wish to reflect on the following
messages:
Learning by doing
Southworth focuses on the view prevalent among school leaders that they learn most by ‘doing
the job’. One implication of this is that headteacher appointments should be on the basis of
confidence that the candidate is committed to continuous, reflective learning: their work is a
‘course of study’ so they need to be good students.
He argues that new heads are likely to benefit more from opportunities to discuss and learn from
their own work than from courses with ‘new’ content. More thought needs to be given to the
development of deputy heads, whose opportunities to learn from ‘doing the job’ of head in their
current school may be restricted.
Understanding the curriculum, pedagogy, student and adult learning
Instructional leadership demands credibility and empathy with teachers. Too often,
headteachers have to rely on out-of-date or assumed knowledge of teaching and learning, while
the training offered to them has been on other management tasks (budget, human resources,
marketing, etc).
The demand of our ‘knowledge society’ is for learning organisations, thus Instructional
leadership needs high levels of knowledge and understanding of curricula, pedagogy, student
and adult learning. This represents a major challenge for NCSL.

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Organisational conditions
Southworth is convinced that “learning schools must facilitate teachers’ pedagogic growth, since
the development of their teaching skills and repertoires seems to me to be the major content
area. The curriculum of learning schools should be pedagogy.” He also finds a correlation
between instructional leadership and certain organisational conditions associated with ‘learning
communities’.
The conditions which leaders might benefit from monitoring are identified as:
• a teacher-culture of collaboration, in which formal and informal professional dialogue is the
norm, including challenge and debate
• enquiry into pupils’ perspectives on their own learning
• provision of multiple opportunities for teacher mentoring, coaching and school based
professional development
• explicit efforts to manage professional knowledge in the school through audits of teacher
strengths, skills and needs

Thus the school becomes a ‘teaching and learning’ school, with “the most hospitable
environment for the exercise of instructional leadership…because professional cultures
characterised by openness, trust and security appear to be the ones where teachers feel
confident to become learners”.
Southworth closes by reflecting that, in a world where more and more enterprises are interested
in developing themselves as ‘learning organisations’, it is time for school leaders to present
themselves as leaders of teachers par excellence.

References
Blase, J and Blase, J, 1998, Handbook of instructional leadership: how really good principals
promote teaching and learning, Thousand Oaks, CA, Corwin Press

Hallinger, P and Heck, R, 1997, Exploring the principal’s contribution to school effectiveness,
School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 8(4), 1–35
Leithwood, K, Jantzi, D and Steinback, R, 1999, Changing leadership for changing times,
Buckingham, Open University Press

© National College for School Leadership 2003 5