Abstract:

This study explored the perceived influence of instructional leadership roles played by accounting educators on learner performance. The instructional leadership theory postulate that instructional leadership practices within school have an influence on learners’ performance. Until date, there has been a lot of research on the roles of School Managements Teams as instructional leaders in the field of educational management and leadership. A point often overlooked is that instructional leadership takes place at different school management levels, including at the classroom level by the educators. However, there is a paucity of research on the role of an educator as an instructional leader in general and in the South African context in specific. To provide both explanation and validation of the instructional leadership roles played by educators this study used a sequential explanatory paradigm. 61 Accounting secondary schools educators in 5 selected districts in one province in South African participated in the study. In the first phase, the quantitative findings showed that educators played various instructional leadership roles that are perceived to influence learners’ performance such as goals setting, sharing the vision of teaching and learning, implementing the curriculum, ensuring effective teaching and learning takes place, appraisal and rewarding learners, devise and adopting teaching and learning strategy and ensuring the provision of learning aid material and many others. In the second phase qualitative provided validation of instructional roles played by educators and explained the phenomenon. Evidence from thematic analysis of the responses indicates that although instructional leadership roles played by educators vary with contexts of schools there are common similarities in instructional leadership practices that are perceived to have an influence on learner performance. This study concluded that a sequential explanatory paradigm is the most approach to explore instructional leadership roles played by educators since these practices are socially constructed through human interaction and experiences hence they are context-based.

Keywords:

Instructional leadership, instructions, teaching and learning, Accounting, Accounting learners, Accounting educators, secondary schools, South Africa.