According to Lunenburg and Ornstein (2008:3), many people are involved in the life of a successful school. For this reason, collaboration and team-work are needed, irrespective of the person’s status. Apart from the principal and the teaching staff, there are many others, such as the cleaners, secretaries, food handlers, patrollers and care-takers who all have very important supportive roles to play. Furthermore, the learners are the essential components of the school community, and the principal as instructional leader has to be focused on their development to their full potential.
a) The educators
The educators are the most important resources in the school. According to Pollard (2002:81), classroom life can be seen as being created by the educators and the learners as they respond to the situations in which they find themselves. Niyazi (2009:440) maintains that the educators are no longer isolated from their classrooms. Instead, they are authorized by high authority and are responsible for the whole school environment and the school programme. Effective educators participate in out-of-classroom activities. It has been indicated that educators are people who hold a particular position in the schools. Each person is unique, with particular cultural and material experiences making up his or her biography. This provides the seedbed for his or her sense of “self”, and influences his or her personality and perspective. Having the capacity to empathize and having the confidence to project and assert oneself are important in teaching.
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Much of what a particular teacher is able to achieve in the classroom will be influenced by him or her. People have strengths and weaknesses, and most educators would agree that classroom life tends to reveal these fairly quickly. Reflective teaching has therefore much to do with facing such features of ourselves in a constructive and objective manner and in a way which incorporates a continuous capacity to change and develop. The educators as people have opinions, perspectives, attitudes, values and beliefs. This particularly human attribute of being able to review the relationship of ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be’ is one which the educators often manifest when considering their aims and examining their educational values and philosophies. Ideally, a very important factor which influences the educators’ perceptions in the classroom is that the teacher has to cope personally as well as professionally with the classroom situation. For this reason, it is suggested that a fundamental element of coping in the classroom or of survival is very deeply personal, for it involves educators with a particular image of themselves, acting in the very challenging situation which the classroom represents (Pollard 2002:81). What is possible for the educators to do is hindered by the basic facts of the large numbers of learners in the classroom, limited resources, compulsory attendance, a legally- defined curriculum policy and other external expectations that exist about what should and what should not take place.
The principal as instructional leader should deal with the following aspects in the management of the educators as the most important human resources in the school.
i) Teacher absenteeism:
As indicated by Brodie et al. (2002:548), and supported by Ngcobo and Tikly (2010:209), Van der Berg, Taylor, Gustafsson, Spaull and Armstrong (2011), Mbali and Douglas (2012:529) and Lam, Ardington and Leibbrandt (2011:122), late-coming and absenteeism in the South African school system is rife on the part of both the educators and the learners. This results in considerably reduced time for teaching and learning, and is especially significantly negative for both Mathematics and reading. According to Chisholm (2006:121), in township and rural schools in South Africa the rate of absenteeism and non-involvement by the educators in the affairs of the school is high. Spaull (2012:80) further elaborates that the high rates of teacher absenteeism
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are associated with lower learner performance, because of the fact that the educators are essential to the learning process. The lower learner performance is largely due to the inadequate coverage of the curriculum and shorter time on-task. The high rates of teacher absenteeism can also have a reciprocal effect on learner absenteeism, whereby the learners choose not to attend school because they are unsure about whether their educators will be at school on that particular day.
ii) The teacher’s content knowledge:
A powerful factor that impacts on learner performance is the teacher’s content knowledge. Leithwood and Jantzi (2010:421) indicate that the quality of instruction which is dependent on the teacher’s knowledge of the content and pedagogy exerts a powerful influence on the learners’ performance. According to Niyazi (2009:440), educators with poor content knowledge, outdated teaching practices and low expectations are in dire need of focused professional development. When the educators improve their content knowledge and the knowledge of the best practices planned to increase the learners’ involvement and performance, they develop higher expectations of their own and their learners’ performance. As their sense of self-efficacy increases so does their teaching success. The principal as instructional leader must continually ensure that the educators stay abreast of the latest knowledge. Spaull (2012:81) agrees that the educators cannot teach what they do not know. While pedagogical skills, teacher motivation and classroom resources are all important inputs into the learners’ learning process, sufficient teacher content knowledge of the subject being taught is a necessary condition for the learners’ learning.
b) The learners
The principal as instructional leader has a role to play in managing the learners as a resource in the school. School populations worldwide are diverse, and this is also true of South Africa. Cunningham and Cordeiro (2006:93) maintain that diversity is the norm in all schools. The staff and the learner populations are diverse, whether the school is located in an urban or a rural area, whether it consists predominantly of one racial or ethnic group or of a variety of cultural groups. Diversity includes differences in age, gender, sexual orientation, political beliefs, socioeconomic status, religion, physical and mental ability, language, and ethnicity. Although some schools
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have a greater diversity than others, all the schools must acknowledge and act on the diversity found in their populations, the community itself, the state, the nation and in the schools. The principal should ensure that the staff and the learners are aware of diversity, have knowledge and understanding about diversity, and behave on the basis that knowledge takes action. Lunenburg and Ornstein (2008:23) maintain that the lack of the familiarity of the educators with their learners’ culture, learning styles and communication patterns translates into the educators holding negative expectations for the learners, what some theorists refer as ‘deficit thinking’. This is often caused by inappropriate curricula and instructional materials, and the assessment of the learners.
Included in the notion of diversity is socioeconomic status (SES). According to Cunningham and Cordeiro (2006:93), socioeconomic status (SES) refers to stratification that can be measured by factors such as economic status, family background, and job prestige. A broader term is social class, which involves large categories of people of similar SES who have in common such attributes as cultural identification, lifestyle and attitudes. SES is strongly correlated with academic success. Cunningham and Cordeiro (2006:93) indicated that researchers have found that children coming from low socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to do poorly at school than children coming from high socioeconomic backgrounds. Lunenburg and Ornstein (2008:24) support the above statement by highlighting that academic risk is highly correlated with race and social class: at-risk learners are more likely to come from disadvantaged home backgrounds, whereas high-achieving learners are likely to come from advantaged home backgrounds. Ideally, this does not mean that all children who are poor will do less well at school because they are poor. Families that are financially stable or affluent have greater access to resources; families struggling to survive are more concerned with paying the rent and with food than acquiring educational resources. Generally, the more the socioeconomic resources available to children, the better will the children’s educational attainment be.
The above discussion is supported by what Spaull (2012:111) indicates, namely that socio- economic status has the largest impact on learner performance within the South African context. Principals in low SES schools face more challenges than principals at the head of schools serving a high SES population. The poverty level impacts negatively on the learners’ achievement as a
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stronger predictor of academic failure. School poverty extends beyond the effect of the individual learner’s condition; it has a cumulative effect (Spaull 2012). In poverty-stricken areas the principal as instructional leader faces challenges such as the poor nutrition of the learners, the lack of health care, violence and unstable home environments. Furthermore, poverty-stricken schools are more likely to have less experienced educators, which negatively affect teaching and learning. The principal as instructional leader is faced with the additional challenge of devising strategies to raise funds in order to address the shortcomings and to increase the appropriate resources in his or her school (Vanderhaar et al. 2007:19).