Abstract
COVID-19 has shaken the foundations of every sector globally. In the South African education milieu, the traditional methods of teaching, learning, and managing schools changed drastically overnight, and management roles and responsibilities were pushed to extraordinary limits beyond any governing legislation. Although COVID-19 has changed the face of educational leadership forever, it has also pinpointed areas for improvement in management that cannot and should not be ignored. Currently, we are moving in “unprecedented territory” (Harris, 2020:322) with very few clues or guidelines to guide us on the way forward.
Pre-COVID, leadership roles and responsibilities in schools were more traditional (Harris, 2020), determined by the type of leadership expected of the mandated role. Core functions of middle management (heads of department; grade heads and teachers assuming leadership positions) were solely in assisting the principal in managing the school curriculum and to corroborate that learning and teaching were executed in the most productive manner. During COVID-19, the roles of middle leaders were distributed where staff within phases/departments took on additional roles as leaders assisting teachers with teaching using the online platform.
This distribution of roles resulted in the practicing of distributive leadership, which has been researched extensively, but little is known about how the onset of COVID-19 impacted the roles of middle leaders in South African public schools. Will COVID-19 re-model the educational middle management system as we know it, will it return to the “old normal” (Harris, 2020), or will a new unified system emerge incorporating the old and the new management leadership styles and what infrastructure needs to be put in place for optimal education and distributive leadership management?
This study was located within a qualitative research design, using a case study approach within the interpretivist paradigm. The sample was purposively selected, consisting of three middle managers and seven post-level one teachers that occupy grade heads/ leaders’ roles in a primary school in the Gauteng, East Rand region. The researcher conducted semi-structured individual interviews with ten participants to obtain their understanding, feelings, experiences, and insight about the research problem, which dealt with middle leaders' understanding of distributive leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic.