Abstract
To date, little research has been conducted on subject leadership by primary and/or junior secondary school heads of department (HODs). Unlike their senior secondary school counterparts, South African science HODs have the more complex task of leading in the multidisciplinary context of natural sciences (NS 1 ). Such leadership comes in addition to the complications of role ambiguity, limited time and authority that are inherent in the HOD position. Using interviews and 360° multi-rater by four teachers and subject meeting observations, data were transcribed and categorised into themes that describe the instructional leadership practices of three NS HODs in South Africa. This paper is part of a more comprehensive PhD study. It suggests that providing leadership for NS teaching is more complex in practice than has been reported to date. In the context of increasing focus on accountability and national testing, the unintended consequence has been the neglect of the junior secondary NS teachers by the HODs. Furthermore, the data suggest that the HODs tend to limit their attention to areas of their own specialisation. The paper concludes with a conceptual framework that provides guidance for improving instructional leadership by the HODs in such multidisciplinary contexts, especially for the junior secondary school levels. It also recommends the restructuring of the conglomerate departments to make them more effective.
Keywords
Introduction
School leadership, including instructional leadership, has historically been seen as the purview of the school principal. As schools become more complex in terms of their subject offerings and organisational arrangements, the principals have come to depend on the specialised knowledge of heads of department (HODs) to provide instructional leadership in the various subjects (Ng et al., 2015). HODs are subject specialists who are responsible for establishing and ensuring high standards of teaching and learning in their subjects. Unlike their senior secondary school counterparts, primary and junior secondary natural sciences (NS) HODs have a more complex task of leading in a multidisciplinary context, where the offerings are less specialised and often include physics, chemistry, life sciences, earth sciences, environmental and agricultural sciences. In the South African context, NS lays the foundation for at least four high school subjects, that is, physical sciences, life sciences, geography and agricultural sciences.
Making the transition from NS at the primary and junior secondary levels to physical sciences in high school is problematic for the teachers and learners. The challenge is ensuring that junior and senior secondary school science is aligned and that there is continuity of teachers and key instructional goals (Lai and Cheung, 2013). Owing to increased focus on the Grade 12 exit examinations in South Africa specifically, NS teaching has tended to be marginalised and overshadowed by efforts to improve the subject results in the tested grades. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many schools sometimes allocate less qualified teachers to NS in Grades 8–9 (junior secondary) relative to Grades 10–12. These teachers are either generalists or specialists in only one or occasionally two of the five NS domains and are therefore more inclined to teach only what they know to the exclusion of what they are unfamiliar and uncomfortable with (Ng et al., 2015). The role of the NS HODs therefore becomes vital to ensure that all the prescribed topics are covered adequately.
HODs are specialist school leaders tasked with managing teaching and learning of specific subjects. Instructional leadership for the HODs tends to be context dependent because subjects have histories, philosophies, cultures and values that differ from one subject to the next (Hallinger and Heck, 2011). Furthermore, the relevance, perceptions and status of a subject and its department often shape decisions about resources and professional development of teachers. NS is one such federal subject whose complexity has led to the present investigation on the nature and practice of instructional leadership for science at junior secondary school levels in South Africa.
This paper attempts to understand the leadership and professional development experienced by NS teachers in Gauteng province secondary schools in South Africa. The purpose of the study is two-fold: firstly, to understand the HOD role and challenges faced by science HODs as they engage in instructional leadership and secondly to compare the realities of this leadership to the experiences of NS teachers. The paper begins with a theoretical perspective on instructional leadership that guided the study. We then describe the research methodology, conclude with a discussion of the findings and make recommendations on better ways to support NS teachers as they implement the multidisciplinary NS curriculum.
Literature and conceptual framework
The South African Department of Basic Education (DBE) introduced the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statements (CAPS) with the aim of raising standards of educational outcomes in the country (DBE, 2011). In addition to the CAPS, school-based assessment tasks (SBATs) were introduced for each subject. However, Umalusi 2 evaluators suggest that teachers lack (a) resources to prepare for practical work, (b) subject expertise, (c) knowledge and skills to develop their own SBAT and (d) time to plan and reflect on the curriculum (Umalusi, 2008). This curriculum demand on teachers has been marked by an increasing shift of responsibility to HODs, in particular, as curriculum leaders, to support teachers in the development of SBATs and the implementation of the latest curriculum.
Wanzare (2013) refers to the HOD role as that of instructional supervision, which is more than just a position in a structure, but one that has interpersonal, technical, informational, administrative, change management as well as conceptual skills and behaviours associated with it. Teachers’ expectations of the HOD; the expectations of the principal, as well as the views of the HODs themselves all add to the complexity of the role. In the South African context, education policies often present the position of the HOD as one of managerial control instead of instructional leadership (DoE, 1999). The HOD’s role is hermaphroditic (Siskin, 1994): neither fully a class teacher nor fully an administrator (subject leader). The duality of their role creates confusion (Stephenson, 2010) because they have dual accountability to the school leadership and to the teachers they lead. They also have to manage the tension between quality assurance and threats to collegiality within their departments (Wanzare, 2013).
HOD role and responsibility
Kruskamp and Zepeda (2007) suggest that HODs tend to create their own roles, in the absence of clear policy guidelines and a lack of direction from principals and/or deputy principals. In many schools, the position of the HOD is an underutilised resource (Weller, 2001) that could be harnessed to improve teaching and learning. Bush (2013: S18) emphasises the urgency for school leaders to prioritise managing teaching and learning and not retreating into their offices to do routine administrative work. HODs often lack the release time from their teaching duties (Brown et al., 2000; Kruskamp and Zepeda, 2007; Ng et al., 2015), feel that the role is overloaded (Barnett et al., 2012) and there is very little time to support junior secondary teachers (Grades 8–9).
As suggested earlier, NS HODs are mostly specialists in one or two fields – they are unlikely to be experts in all five science domains. There is thus an incentive for HODs to adopt a distributed leadership paradigm and use teacher agency (Sherer, 2008) in their own leadership roles. Melville, Jones and Campbell (2014) argue that leadership is not limited to formal positions and formal titles are not sufficient to achieve true distributed leadership. Very little is known about the way HODs go about doing their work and the perspectives they have on what the role should entail (Stephenson, 2010).
Taken together these studies suggest that the role of the NS HOD is complex and the subject context needs to be considered when designing and recruiting for such a subject leadership.
Conceptual framework
The role of subject leadership is context dependent and there is no single hymn sheet for leading a science department in different schools (Hallinger and Heck, 2011). Turner and Bolam (1998) argue that contingency theory is sometimes useful to explain how and why HODs practice (their role of) instructional leadership in the ways they do. The actions of the HODs often depend on the leader him-/herself, the task that needs to be performed, the departmental staff or followers and the situation or context (Spillane et al., 2004; Timperley, 2005).
To understand the work of the HODs fully, this paper proposes a conceptual framework that marries the provisional model developed by Turner and Bolam (1998) with the teacher leadership framework proposed by York-Barr and Duke (2004). The framework shows how the personal attributes of the instructional leader and his/her knowledge of the context and its problems can be integrated to provide leadership through effective interactions with department members with the aim of influencing teaching choices (Robinson, 2010). The framework is based on research into the effects of the roles and characteristics of HODs as instructional leaders. Six major components of instructional leadership by HODs have been identified in the literature and are discussed below.
The first component focuses on the HODs’ personal attributes, which include the profiles of HODs, subject proficiency, experience in the subject (Wanzare, 2013), professional credibility and trustworthiness, as well as agency in resourcing the department. These attributes influence how the department members view the HOD.
Leadership work
The second component looks at the extent to which the HOD practises leadership through setting a vision, building relationships and collegiality, developing teachers as well as the manner in which leadership is distributed among members of the department (Koh et al., 2011). This kind of instructional leadership also ensures the quality, maintenance and improvement of teaching and learning (Wanzare, 2013). Classroom data are used to make decisions about professional development needs, interventions and grouping of learners where needed. An instructional leader influences many of the activities listed above and the type of leadership is also influenced by the followers.
The third component includes the way in which the HOD negotiates his/her influence through the school conditions, including social, political, economic, cultural and other contextual problems (Louis and Robinson, 2012) to create an environment that supports effective teaching and learning.
The fourth component focuses on how the HOD influences teaching choices through setting objectives with followers, planning and monitoring instruction, allocating resources and developing reflective practice on the outcome of instruction (Lai and Cheung, 2013). This is done using interpersonal skills to establish trusting and collaborative relationships, not only from formal activities but also through informal collegial activities (Melville et al., 2014; York-Barr and Duke, 2004). Subject departments are this means of influence. The secondary school curriculum subjects are organised into departments that manage structure, content and instructional practices of the subject or subject groupings (Lai and Cheung, 2013). The subject department provides a “necessary unit of analysis for within school variation” (Highfield, 2010: 173) and Harris (2001) calls them units of change. Departments are platforms from which teachers engage with curriculum matters, critically reflect on and share their own practices (Vercio et al., 2008).
In a study of Canadian HODs, Schmidt (2000) observed that departments were characterised by qualified teachers who were committed and capable of employing flexible approaches to teaching and learning. This is, however, not always the case; in South Africa, for instance, not all NS teachers are even qualified to teach the subject. This paper explores empirical data on the qualifications of a sample of teachers who teach NS in South African junior secondary schools, and investigates the contribution they make to the kind of leadership support that the HOD is expected to provide. The composition of the department, which comprises teachers from diverse sub-disciplines, has an effect on the department’s cohesiveness, building of collegiality as well as the instructional leadership practices of science HODs (Melville et al., 2014).
The fifth component of administration and management involves the overarching role of managing people and resources (see Figure 1). The subject department co-creates and uses routines and artefacts as means of influencing the followers to monitor the interaction of departmental staff.
Abridged version of the conceptual framework (adapted from York-Barr and Duke, 2004).
The sixth and last component introduces the feedback to other components of the framework for their enhancement and modification to achieve departmental and organisational goals and evaluation of the effectiveness of leadership (York-Barr and Duke, 2004). It involves critical reflection by individuals, teams and the organisation, as well as follow-up, mentorship and dialogues about effectiveness of instructional practices and learners’ work (Koh et al., 2011). The HOD consistently monitors the alignment of curriculum, instruction and assessment standards using data and technology to ensure accountability for performance in the classroom (Nguyen and Ng, 2014). Purposeful classroom observation (Kruskamp and Zepeda, 2007), especially that initiated by the teachers and which is followed by proper feedback, is key.
Using the conceptual framework developed above, we then ask the key questions of our study, that is, how do science HODs practice instructional leadership for the improvement of teaching and learning of NS in the South African school context? And how do teachers perceive this leadership by their HODs?
Methodology
Our engagement with the three public township schools was to explore science subject leadership in schools from different districts and contexts. Given the complexity of the HOD role, we used semi-structured interviews with the three HODs and 360° multi-rater interviews with the four NS teachers, who were led by these HODs, to gather holistic evidence of the way HODs provided leadership. Scholars claim that the interviews are useful because they enable the interviewees to interpret their worlds and express how they regard their situations from their own perspectives (Cohen et al., 2011). Because of the sensitivity of discussions about senior members of staff, individual interviews were deemed more appropriate and strict confidentiality was observed. Although the lead researcher has a long personal history of involvement with schools, it was helpful that for the past decade or so, she has been working in the non-governmental sector to empower teachers through various professional development programmes. This proximity to the teachers and distance from the formal structures helped to narrow the power gap during the research process. Interviews lasted between 30 and 60 minutes, were audiotaped and transcribed.
Furthermore, we observed six department and district cluster meetings, which were deemed appropriate to understand better the discourse and the power relationships between the leaders and the teachers. We observed district cluster meetings that were facilitated by the district subject advisors 3 , Thandeka and Zonke, to understand the subject leadership from the district perspective. The six meeting observations were also used to validate the interview data. The limitation of this qualitative approach is that the findings cannot be generalised. However, to gain an understanding of the reason why certain practices were preferred to others, a narrative and observational method was preferred (Yin, 2011). Observation protocols recorded categories such as who led the discourse, the content of the meetings and the teacher engagements with the meeting content. The necessary ethical measures were observed, including seeking informed consent and providing for confidentiality of the participating schools and teachers, by using pseudonyms (McMillan and Schumacher, 2010).
Following interviews, we coded transcripts using categories that included teacher capacity to teach NS, capacity of HOD to support NS teachers and the teaching of the physical science sub-discipline. The transcripts were sent back to participants for verification.
The science departments at these schools were led by male HODs who had extensive teaching experience ranging from 10 to 21 years and from 5 to 16 years as HODs at the time of data collection. The first school, Alpha Secondary School, was 20 years old, located close to an informal settlement and comprised a temporary prefabricated structure without any electricity supply. The school was established as a hosting structure while a permanent school structure was being built. When the new school relocated, this building was left to be used by learners who could not be accommodated in either the new school or other neighbouring schools. The HOD taught Grades 10–12 mathematics and there were two NS teachers.
The second school, Sheba Secondary School, was a 60-year-old township school with a relatively good infrastructure. The science HOD taught Grades 10 and 11 physical sciences and there were three NS teachers. The third school, Fhutura Secondary School, was approximately 12 years old with good infrastructure in a new township, east of Johannesburg. The science HOD taught Grades 10–12 physical sciences and there were three NS teachers.
Findings
NS is a compulsory subject that is offered at primary and junior secondary level comprising 25% life sciences, 50% physical sciences and 25% earth sciences. This means that teachers who teach this subject must be generalists or specialists in at least the three science disciplines.
Personal attributes
In this paper, we investigated the qualifications of NS teachers at the three schools as presented in Table 1.
Specialisation of natural sciences teachers in the three schools.
The data show that none of the four teachers had physical sciences qualifications. At least three of the teachers had some qualification to teach 25% of the syllabus, either earth or life sciences. The teacher from Alpha had qualifications that were not relevant to the teaching of NS at all.
The data suggest that although some of the teachers had been teaching NS for some time, they had not grasped the content and they could be avoiding certain sections, confirming Ng et al.’s (2015) argument that teachers are not comfortable teaching unfamiliar content. One of the teachers from Sheba School responded in the following way when asked about her qualifications in the subject. I was teaching life and living and now it is matter and materials and I need to refer again. I have to restudy that. I feel like I am learning with the children (Sibo, Sheba).
The other teacher, Itu, from this school expressed the same sentiments. I am good in life sciences but I struggle with physical sciences, I need help with the PS (Itu, Sheba).
None of the teachers indicated that they needed help with the life and living section, which comprises 25% of the NS syllabus. Three of the teachers were already qualified to teach this section. The teacher from Alpha, Aya, needed help in another sub-discipline. Last year I was struggling with earth and beyond because I do not know geography myself…I asked the geography teacher to help me (Aya, Alpha). Learners do not like the balancing of equations in matter and material (Aya, Alpha). We set the tests and the HOD calls us because he is not happy with our questions for the SBAT….When he intervenes he comes with big words (Feli, Fhutura).
Qualifications and experience of science HODs in the three schools.
All HODs were teachers of Grade 10–12 subjects. The HODs found the pressure (time and workload) exerted by teaching subjects such as mathematics and physical sciences at these grades overwhelming; this was also experienced by the NS teachers. The teacher from Fhutura understood how much work the HOD had to do and recommended that the HOD delegated some tasks to people who had time available to do it (NS teachers). The HOD is focusing on FET. He has too much work…. he is doing everything (Feli, Fhutura). There’s a lot of work and challenges in teaching Grade 12…I prioritise Grade 12 because they will be leaving at the end of the year (Sibo, Sheba). He always has FET learners around him. He should be attending to the GET [General Education and Training or Grades 3–9] learners as well (Feli, Fhutura). The NS teachers are happy but they feel they don’t get the kind of support they need. I am always in class, teaching, but I also try to prioritise NS and Tech education. Teachers have not asked for help in matter and materials, they think it is easy (HOD, Fhutura). There is not much natural sciences because the majority of the teachers are [teach] physical science (Sibo, Sheba).
Leadership work
The fact that HODs do not teach NS could also render them incapable of supporting teachers in a subject they are not conversant with themselves. The HODs exhibited reliance on the district subject advisor such as in Alpha school where the HOD referred teachers to the subject advisor because he was not a science specialist himself. He indicated that he did classroom observations and, When I see shortcomings I refer the teachers to the facilitator [subject advisor]…Otherwise we go to them when we need assistance (HOD, Alpha). We attend cluster meetings once a quarter. When we attend we can ask questions how to treat certain topics (Aya, Alpha).
Administration and management
All three schools had scheduled their subject meetings in their management plans. However, the conversations that we had with the teachers and the HODs proved that the meetings did not always take place as required. Even though the meetings were considered important, they were either rescheduled or they did not occur at all. Subject or department meetings do not always materialise as planned (HOD, Fhutura). There is a year plan, but things just occur, but they are flexible. The plan is changed for emergency issues. It is difficult to meet because teachers travel away from school (HOD, Alpha). The meetings are usually on Wednesday during the sports period (Aya, Alpha). There is a meeting management plan. We meet about twice a term. (HOD, Sheba).
Not only the meeting time and space provided challenges, but also the content of the subject meetings. HODs used the subject meetings to address administrative and management concerns. We discuss curriculum and management plans at these meetings. Not much for Grade 8 and 9 NS is discussed…(Sibo, Sheba). There is no discussion on the subject, like natural sciences. There is no common planning (Aya, Alpha).
The HOD of Alpha Secondary School confirmed that he only addresses administrative matters at meetings with teachers, saying, I only address administration issues; there is a lot of administration for teachers. We meet with maths teachers and we only discuss administrative issues, learner discipline and the files and records that we should keep (Aya, Alpha). A teacher from Sheba shared the same sentiment. There is not much natural sciences because the majority of the teachers are [teach] physical science (Sibo, Sheba).
Structure and organisation of subject departments
The science departments in the schools comprised subjects from different phases (GET and FET bands). Table 3 sets out the composition of science departments headed by the HODs. The symbol ✓ indicates a subject in the department and X indicates that the subject is not part of the department.
Organisation of science departments.
The findings reveal that the composition of (subject) departments meant it was a challenge for the HODs to discuss individual subject issues at these meetings. The NS teachers were a minority in the meetings. The departmental meetings did not work as forums for building collegiality among teachers who worked in the same department. When both GET and FET teachers were together they had no patience for each other: “because we have GET and FET teachers mixed, when we discuss GET matters FET teachers tend to get bored”, said the HOD from Fhutura.
Feedback and evaluation
Another way of providing support is by observing teachers in the classroom, allowing them to reflect on their practice and providing feedback. Unfortunately, our conversations with the teachers and HODs revealed that classroom observations rarely took place in the schools. Teachers indicated that their HODs only did classroom observations once a year, for Integrated Quality Management System purposes (IQMS
5
). I do classroom observations under IQMS in the second and third quarter and provide feedback. I am very accommodative (HOD, Alpha). Yes, I do get feedback. He always tells me to fix the classroom management (Feli, Fhutura). If classroom observation is unplanned union issues come to play (HOD, Sheba).
However, the HODs or any other capable teacher could present workshops for the teachers as another form of professional development instead of classroom observation.
Out of school professional development
There was, however, evidence of subject advisors providing professional development sessions once a term, in the form of subject cluster meetings. We had an opportunity to observe six of these cluster meetings, three in each district. These meetings occurred in the afternoons and lasted approximately 90 minutes.
Grades 7 to 9 NS teachers and HODs from 120 schools in both districts were expected to attend the subject cluster meetings that we observed, but only nine science HODs attended. Approximately half of the HODs at these meetings were Grade 7 HODs who taught at primary schools. One HOD confessed that he did not attend NS workshops, saying, I do not attend NS workshops, I request the subject teachers to attend (HOD, Alpha).
While Thandeka focused on subject-content matters, another subject advisor, Zonke, focused on the structure of the upcoming common examination and did not address any subject-specific matters at all. Teachers started leaving the meeting after roughly 45 minutes. She also made announcements about Grade 7 competitions. Zonke did not present strategies for classroom practice or give direction for the next steps.
Discussion
This paper explored the leadership practices of science HODs at three schools from different contexts and situations. Instructional leadership practices by HODs, as described in this paper, are characterised by the contributions made by the personal attributes of the HODs, the school conditions and the means to influence instruction, as described in the conceptual framework. Below we discuss how the HODs used the six components of the framework to provide instructional leadership and we reflect on the effectiveness of that leadership.
Conditions at schools
The paper identified three effects caused by school conditions. Firstly, the composition of departments in the schools under study was not subject-based but showed a variety of arrangements and grouping of subjects to form a department. In other countries researchers report on subject departments, for example, English, science or mathematics departments (Highfield, 2010), while in South Africa that is not the case. The schools in the study arranged their departments to suit their resources, however, because of this arrangement, the HOD’s role and time became incredibly challenged.
Secondly, the school principals did not provide time and space for HODs to hold their meetings (Ng et al., 2015). Meetings were held during lunch times, sports periods or even after school hours. This indicates that the principals were not as supportive and undervalued these meetings. This practice, although similar to experiences reported by Ng et al. (2015), is contrary to findings by Klar (2012), who reports on principals that fostered the work of the HODs by providing time and space for meetings and even attended some of the meetings or invited external experts to conduct programmes, as in the study by Ng et al. (2015). The fact that the department meetings at the schools we studied were scheduled in the year plan but some other unforeseen events took their place was of concern for the effective management of departments by HODs.
Means of leadership influence
The report shows that the HODs used various ways to influence NS instructional practices.
Professional development
The HODs in the paper did not initiate professional development at all, neither for the teachers in their departments nor for themselves. The HODs seem to have adopted a reactive and deficit model of teacher development (Lai and Cheung, 2013), that is, waiting for teachers to cry for “help” before they took any action. They did not attend nor support teachers to attend cluster meetings; neither did they proactively develop instructional material. Instead, as the Fhutura teacher indicated, the HOD would only comment once the teachers had developed the assessment tasks.
There are four possible reasons why HODs did not initiate professional development. Firstly, the HODs did not teach NS and were not conversant with the subject content and the pedagogical challenges of teaching this subject. There was a possibility that any HOD-led professional development could expose their lack of subject content knowledge and hence threaten their leadership power. Secondly, it is possible that the leaders did not know what was going on in the NS classrooms because they did not teach the subject nor conduct frequent classroom observations except when they did the mandatory IQMS observations (Kruskamp and Zepeda, 2007). Consequently, HODs could not identify areas of teacher development need (Lai and Cheung, 2013). Thirdly, the HODs would have been so busy with FET teaching and discussions, and administrative work that they did not have time for a junior secondary subject such as NS, which is not externally examined. Lack of time is a common problem that many researchers have alluded to previously (Brown et al., 2000). This is consistent with the argument that HODs need time off from their teaching duties in order to be able to practice instructional leadership effectively (Kruskamp and Zepeda, 2007). However, it is not clear in this case that if more time was available, it would necessarily be dedicated to NS instead of the more pressing FET grades that are governed by national assessments.
The fourth possible reason for HODs’ failure to initiate professional development may be a lack of subject expertise and knowledge (Melville et al., 2014), given that most of them only know more about teaching learners as opposed to developing teachers (Barnett et al., 2012). Some HODs may have felt that teachers knew more about the subject than themselves (Ng et al., 2015). This is an opportunity rather than a weakness and HODs could use this to build capacity in their good teachers (Sherer, 2008) to become subject senior teachers or lead teachers in NS (Spillane et al., 2004; Timperley, 2005).
Subject meetings
Subject meetings at the three schools did not present a fertile environment for developing collegiality among teachers, nor was there any other forum where this could be done. Meetings tended to focus on administrative matters and created friction between NS and FET teachers instead of collegiality. Sadly, the HODs had no mitigation strategy to address this threat to collegiality (Wanzare, 2013). Focus on administrative matters meant that the HOD was in the power seat and tended to be the sole driver of the meetings. There were no forums for teachers to plan instruction together, analyse learners’ scores, plan interventions (Bennett et al., 2007) or where the HOD could nurture good collegial relationships with the teachers. The fact that unforeseen events were prioritised over the subject meetings may be an indication of the lack of support and devaluing of the importance of the meetings by the school management.
Feedback and evaluation
Throughout the study, we did not find evidence of attempts by HODs or principals to implement systems and procedures to monitor the effectiveness of teaching or reflect on the quality of instructional leadership (Harris, 2001). This is the area that our conceptual framework had identified as absent in previous frameworks. None of the HODs from the three schools mentioned analysis of tests and learner achievement results or monitoring the work of HODs by principals and deputy principals. Although the learners’ test and examination scripts were moderated, the findings suggest that the moderation was done to check the accuracy of marking rather than the learners’ level of understanding of concepts. From the interview with the Fhutura teacher, it was evident that the teacher wanted to provide feedback to the HOD about the need for demonstration lessons and help with the development of SBA tasks. The way leadership is practised in the schools is such that there is no platform for such feedback. The ability to hold one-on-one feedback was not entertained, possibly because of the negative attitude held by the teachers towards classroom observation (Wanzare, 2013). There was clearly no attempt to balance the team collaboration in the departments with the power that the HOD possessed.
The neglect of NS teachers
Implementing a new curriculum and pedagogy can be very difficult in the absence of an effective instructional leader who has the right expertise in the subject. The HODs profiled in this paper tended to neglect NS teachers at crucial times during the implementation of the CAPS curriculum. The involvement of the HODs in FET teaching and learning to the exclusion of Grades 8 and 9 teaching might have been a function of role overload (Barnett et al., 2012; Busher, 1988). This finding, although consistent with the argument that HODs lack time (Kruskamp and Zepeda, 2007), highlights inequalities in the treatment of subjects (Spillane and Hopkins, 2013) within a department. The HODs were more concerned with FET subjects, to the extent that NS was marginalised and NS teachers felt like stepchildren in the department and the school. While this was evident to the researchers, the NS teachers did not voice these concerns as such and may have accepted it as fact. NS was afforded a lower (stepchild) status compared to other science subjects in the FET band.
There are three possible reasons why NS teachers tended to feel neglected compared to teachers of other subjects in the department. Firstly, their feeling of neglect stems from the fact that the HODs in this paper did not even teach the NS that they were expected to support, monitor and improve. Secondly, NS, a junior secondary subject, is grouped in the department with subjects that are in the FET band – subjects that are externally assessed by the National Department of Basic Education and which therefore have an elevated status in school (Spillane and Hopkins, 2013). NS thus has a lower status compared to these subjects although, ironically, NS lays the foundation for these very subjects. This may explain the uneven power dynamics which account for the silencing of the NS teachers. Thirdly, the allocation of less qualified teachers could be another reason for feelings of neglect among NS teachers. In the paper, the NS teachers reported that they felt as if they had been dumped to teach NS and were not given adequate support.
This scenario suggests an urgent need for the HODs to provide opportunities for professional development, whether self-initiated by teachers, school-based or external opportunities for teachers to acquire the appropriate expertise, knowledge and skills to teach the subject. Interestingly, some of the teachers already appealed to their own agency (Sherer, 2008) to identify opportunities for development and informally created professional networks with their colleagues.
Conclusion
As an outcome of the exploratory study on subject leadership, in the South African context, this paper has helped to identify a number of challenges faced by HODs in supporting the teaching of NS in junior secondary schools. The findings affirm the challenging nature of the role of the HOD in general, as well as the challenges presented by the particular subject and its context. The paper suggests that, as long as the qualifications of HODs and NS teachers as well as the organisational structure of science departments continue to be unsatisfactory, then its impact on learners’ performance in physical sciences will remain a cause for concern. The fact that less qualified teachers are allocated to teach NS suggests that this subject is not accorded the respect it probably deserves. The less qualified teachers are not even provided with opportunities for professional development by the HODs or through the support of the school principals.
Significantly, the findings also show that NS is so marginalised that science HODs do not, for the most part, even teach it but tend to focus on FET subjects. The study has enriched our understanding on the importance of the personal attributes, particularly the knowledge and expertise of HODs, especially science HODs, in secondary schools. Urgent attention needs to be paid to the subject groupings in departments and the allocation of teachers who are expected to teach NS in schools. We recommend that the structure of departments could be reconfigured to include a junior secondary science HOD, who would provide the much-needed leadership. This proposal, even though it has staffing implications, can be factored into the existing arrangements of some schools without much difficulty.
The main aim of this paper was to explore the practices of science HODs as they support the teaching of NS in secondary schools. From the perspectives of the teachers themselves, the findings have provided a critique on the organisation and practice of subject leadership by HODs in this context. While we know much more about the practices of leadership for NS in schools from this study, there is still a lot more to learn about (science) subject leadership in schools. The qualitative research approach limits the generalisability of the findings and calls for caution in the interpretation of the results. To obtain a more comprehensive picture on this support by HODs, more detailed studies on the teachers’ perceptions and those of principals in different school contexts where HODs also teach NS would be illuminating. This article, however, is a step towards a more comprehensive and research-based understanding on the utility and efficacy of the current structures and practices for subject leadership of NS.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and or publication of this article. The research was partially supported by the South African National Research Foundation (grant no. 90341) and funding from the SANRAL chair in Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Technology Education at the University of the Free State.