The quality of education depends on the quality and commitment of teachers. They are the cornerstone of sustainable transformation in any educational system and play a crucial role preparing well-educated, future-proofed learners. As such, the achievement of goals of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the attainment of the aspirations of the African Union’s (AU) Agenda 2063 rely on the dedicated efforts of teachers who need to be well-trained, professionalised and empowered.
In this regard, one of the aims of SDG 4 and Agenda 2063 is to substantially increase the supply of qualified teachers, especially in science, technology and innovation to enable the development of Africa’s human and social capital. The Transforming Education Summit (TES), a key initiative of the United Nations Secretary-General’s Our Common Agenda launched in September 2021, reiterated the crucial role of teachers as drivers of educational reform. However, the input of teachers is rarely requested, and they are not involved in either decision-making or policy development.
These issues have occupied the research and scholarship of Prof Loyiso C Jita, Dean of the Faculty of Education and SANRAL Chair in Science, Mathematics and Technology Education at the University of the Free State (UFS), over the years. To this end, Prof Jita has focused on instructional leadership, teacher development, how teachers teach, how they learn to teach better, and how leadership structures can support this process as well as curriculum reform. His work sits at the intersection of policy and practice, bringing together his training in education policy and his early experience as a policy researcher. This has led to his participation in the development of many of the new provincial government white papers on education in South Africa in the mid-1990s.
Prof Jita’s scholarship brings together instructional leadership, curriculum studies, teacher education, science, mathematics and technology education, drawing on grounded empirical evidence to inform reforms in teaching, teacher training, school leadership, and the integration of digital pedagogies in both resourced and resource-constrained settings. Across his academic career, Prof Jita has produced a sustained and wide-ranging body of research focused on the core challenges facing science, mathematics and technology education in the Global South. His scholarship has consistently interrogated how teachers learn, lead, and adapt to changing curricular, policy, and classroom contexts.
In one of his numerous research articles, Perceptions and practices of principals: examining instructional leadership for curriculum reform, published in Frontiers in Education, Prof Jita’s findings indicate that while principals perceive themselves as actively engaged in instructional leadership, particularly through Principal Instructional Management dimensions in defining school missions, managing instructional programmes, and fostering positive school climate – gaps exist between their self-perceptions and enacted practices. Thematic analysis shows that principals influence the establishment of school goals, facilitate instructional collaboration, and reinforce positive behaviours among teachers and learners. However, inconsistencies emerge in data-driven decision-making and direct instructional oversight. This study exposes the need for structured training, clearer role expectations, and sustained support to enhance principals’ leadership effectiveness.
Three of his most influential publications, each with over 300 citations, were developed with Prof Jim Spillane of Northwestern University in the US, which conceptualised and helped to foreground the notion of distributed instructional leadership in schools. Managing in the middle: school leaders and the enactment of the accountability policy, with over 600 citations and published in Sage Journals, is one of the ground-breaking pieces on distributed and instructional leadership work worldwide. The article brought to the fore the notion of how school leaders were active agents of policymaking and policy-interpretation, who make sense of and mediate top-down policies from their districts and/or states for the teachers in the schools. More importantly, the paper argued that such mediation would always be situated in the leaders’ professional biographies, school histories and their roles as intermediaries between the policymakers and the classroom teachers.
The impact of that work was far-reaching, as no longer could policymakers assume that policy could and would simply be implemented from the top-to-bottom as intended by the developers. Sense-making and mediation have now become key concepts in thinking about education policy implementation, curriculum transformation, school leadership for improved learning, teacher professional development, teacher education, digital and ICT integration in schools, among others.
Similarly, the article Leading instruction: the distribution of leadership for instruction, which was published in Taylor & Francis Online, helped to bring to the foreground the idea that school improvement and learning improvements may only be achieved and/or harnessed by recognising and marshalling the varied contributions of multiple leaders – formal and informal – within the school contexts. While recognising the important role of the principal in a school, this work suggested that it takes more than the principal to achieve sustainable improvements in teaching and learning within a school context.
It is this idea on the important role of formal and informal school leaders in improving teaching and learning that Prof Jita successfully piloted with the Mpumalanga Department of Education in the establishment of what came to be known as “cluster leaders” – a group of teachers who would lead their colleagues on making curriculum transformations, guide the implementation of the new curriculum and collectively work on improving teaching and learning across schools within a particular district. The concept of “teacher clusters” and/or “cluster leaders” was transformative and embraced and later adopted by all provincial departments of education in South Africa.
Prof Jita often publishes with his postgraduate students and postdoctoral fellows. The research published with ML Mokhele titled, When teacher clusters work: selected experiences of South African teachers with the cluster approach to professional development, published in the South African Journal of Education, and with TC Ndlalane on Teacher clusters in South Africa: opportunities and constraints for teacher development and change, published in Perspectives in Education, explored the benefits (and possible constraints) of collaborative forms of professional development, linking it to the structures and contexts for instructional leadership in schools.
The impact of this work can be seen in the fact that all provincial departments of education in South Africa have since established these collaborative structures of teacher professional development. Prof Jita continues to explore and puzzle over the nature and influence of various subject-specific leadership configurations and professional development on school and classroom change in African contexts. With a specific focus on how these configurations contribute to improving the teaching and learning of science, mathematics and technology in schools, and breaking the digital divide between the resource-rich and the under-resourced contexts in the Global South, Prof Jita’s research has also focused on curriculum policy and implementation issues in African contexts with science and mathematics as the content and context. These contributions have over time informed education policy in South Africa and influenced practices in other sub-Saharan African countries including Botswana, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Nigeria among others.
