From Instructional Leadership to Leadership in Teaching: Why Africa Must Reframe the Conversation

By Leila Abdullahi
Director of Research and Programme Delivery, Education Sub Saharan Africa (ESSA)

Across Africa, school leadership is often framed as “instructional leadership”. But what if the more important question is how leadership enables teaching?

During the recent validation convening of the African Centre for School Leadership (ACSL) hosted in Nairobi, Kenya, in Feb 2026, this question quietly took shape and ultimately inspired this reflection. The workshop was more than a technical review meeting. It became a moment to rethink how Africa understands school leadership. 

ACSL is implemented through a partnership between Education Sub Saharan Africa (ESSA), VVOB – education for development, Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), and Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE). The initiative aims to strengthen school leadership systems across the continent through research, policy engagement, and professional development.

Through its role in the ACSL partnership, ESSA participated in these discussions, contributing perspectives on the emerging research agenda for school leadership in Africa.

The convening brought together researchers, regulators, policymakers, and practitioners from across Africa to examine emerging findings and refine the next phase of continental action.

Across plenaries, breakout sessions, and informal exchanges, one issue emerged with unusual clarity:

Africa must rethink its understanding of school leadership.

The Limits of the Traditional Model

For many years, instructional leadership has dominated global conversations about school improvement. Much of this thinking comes from the Global North, with model’s emphasising the principal’s role in:

• Supervising teaching
• Monitoring lesson delivery
• Tracking performance data
• Enforcing curriculum compliance

These responsibilities matter. However, the framework often assumes a hierarchical, top-down structure where leadership flows in one direction; from principal to teacher.

• It is supervisory.
• It is evaluative.
• It is managerial.

During the ACSL workshop discussions, participants reflected on how this framing often does not fully capture the realities of African schools.

Across many African systems:

• Principals are simultaneously administrators and classroom teachers.
• Data systems are uneven, fragmented, or still developing.
• Professional learning is often informal, peer-driven, and practice-based.
• Authority is shaped by cultural norms and community relationships.
• Leadership is deeply relational, not merely procedural.

These realities demand a more context-responsive lens.

When applied without adaptation, instructional leadership can easily become compliance-oriented rather than transformative, risking a reduction in leadership to monitoring and reporting.

It becomes a checklist, rather than a culture of teaching and learning.

A Shift in Perspective: Leadership in Teaching

A powerful reframing emerged from the workshop discussions:

What if we move from “instructional leadership” to “leadership in teaching”?

This is not just a change in wording, but a shift in perspective. 

Leadership in teaching  recognises that:

• Leadership is not confined to a position.
• Improving teaching is a shared responsibility
• Professional growth is co-created
• Authority can be shared, negotiated, and culturally embedded

Rather than focusing on the supervision of instruction, it focuses on creating conditions that enable teaching to improve.

In many African schools, distributed leadership is already happening. Senior teachers mentor their peers. Communities shape school priorities. 

The challenge, therefore, is not inventing new leadership but rather recognising, studying, and strengthening the leadership practices that already exist within African systems.

For policymakers and education systems, this shift means investing not only in principal supervision skills, but also in collaborative professional learning, distributed leadership practices, and school cultures that support continuous improvement in teaching.

What the Workshop Revealed

The ACSL validation convening revealed several critical tensions:

1. Conceptual Ambiguity

Terms such as instructional leadership, distributed leadership, transformational leadership, and system leadership are often used interchangeably without clarity.

2. Imported Terminology

Leadership frameworks embedded in policy documents often originate from outside Africa and have limited validation in local contexts.

3. Classroom Disconnect

Many leadership research measures administrative behaviour rather than the real impact on teaching and learning.

4. Limited Afrocentric Perspectives

African studies on culturally grounded leadership exists but are scattered and insufficiently documented.

Throughout the discussions, there was broad agreement on one issue:

Africa requires clearer leadership definitions.

A Practical Step Forward

One key recommendation from the convening is the development of a continental standard document on school leadership terminology with relevant context.

Such a document would:

• Provide clear definitions of core leadership concepts
• Clarify how each concept translates into African school contexts
• Distinguish supervisory, relational, system, and pedagogical leadership functions
• Align leadership language with classroom impact
• Serve as a shared reference for policymakers, researchers, and professional development providers

Without definitional clarity:

• Research fragments
• Policy language drifts
• Leadership training loses focus

A continental reference framework would not impose uniformity; it would create coherence while allowing contextual adaptation across diverse education systems.

Rethinking Instructional Leadership as a Research Priority

The discussions also suggested that revisiting the concept of instructional leadership itself should become a priority area for future research. While instructional leadership has long shaped global education debates, there is still limited evidence on how the concept operates within African school systems and whether it adequately reflects the relational, collaborative, and context-driven nature of leadership observed across many schools. Examining how instructional leadership is interpreted, adapted, or redefined in African contexts can help move the conversation toward leadership in teaching, grounding leadership frameworks in the realities of classroom practice and school environments across the continent.

From Validation to Vision

As the ACSL validation convening ended, one message was clear:

Africa does not lack leadership practice.
What it lacks is a strong, evidence-based understanding of that practice.

The next phase of work must therefore focus on:

• strengthening conceptual clarity
• documenting Afrocentric leadership models
• aligning research, policy, and professional development
• investing in sustainable leadership research pipelines

School leadership is widely recognised as a powerful lever for improving education systems.

But unless it is anchored in teaching and grounded in African realities, its transformative potential will remain limited.

Reframing the conversation toward leadership in teaching may offer the pathway needed to better connect research, policy, and classroom practice across the continent.

Acknowledgement

This blog draws on insights from the African Centre for School Leadership (ACSL) validation convening held in Nairobi in February 2026. ACSL is a partnership coordinated by the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) and implemented with Education Sub-Saharan Africa (ESSA), the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE), and VVOB – education for development. We acknowledge the contributions of researchers, policymakers, and practitioners from across Africa who participated in the consultations.