Understanding instructional leadership

Instructional leadership is one of the most enduring constructs in the shifting typology of leadership models (Bush 2011, Bush and Glover 2014). It emerged in the United States as evidence accumulated that leadership could have a positive outcome on student learning outcomes. Described as the ‘new orthdoxy’ in the 1980s, Hallinger (1992: 37) noted that ‘the instructional leader was viewed as the primary source of knowledge for the development of the school’s educational programme’. However, the focus of attention switched to transformational leadership, and subsequently to distributed leadership, as the limitations of the instructional model became increasingly apparent. These may be summarised as follows: