Junior lecturers are entry-level academic staff who, despite their junior position and lack of experience, are often given the responsibility of developing student tutors. This frequently leads to insecurity about how best to approach the task. In response to this, a collaborative mentorship programme was developed in order to provide an enabling context in which junior lecturers could explore various aspects of tutor development. This article reports on participants' responses to the programme, in terms of the personal and pedagogical shifts experienced. It locates the mentorship programme within the context of some of the key challenges in the South African higher education sector. Action research was used to explore how the programme affected junior lecturers' perceptions of themselves in the context of their disciplines and their understanding of innovative tutor development. In order to understand their responses fully, it was also necessary to consider the ways in which the junior lecturers initially perceived themselves in their departments and within the university as a whole. An analysis of the identity shifts among staff suggests that a collaborative mentorship programme of this nature is an effective form of staff development which could be of mutual benefit to staff in similar contexts.

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This study set out to explore primary school principals’ instructional leadership. The study addressed a key issue in the school improvement literature, pertaining to the curriculum leadership of principals. The literature is not entirely clear about which leadership characteristic is more likely to produce the most favourable outcomes in terms of improved learner outcomes, in other words, how the curriculum has been implemented and how leadership in this regard has been effected. The article argues that robust training and development in instructional leadership practices become necessary to support school leaders in this regard. In South Africa, based on numerous reports of poor learner outcomes in schools, we question whether principals possess the necessary skills required to lead and manage curriculum in schools. In this article, the views of five principals, who have completed the Advanced Certificate in Education: School Leadership and Management (ACESLM) programme, are examined. Findings indicate that not all principals who participated in the study are fully conversant with their roles and responsibilities as instructional leaders. They mainly interpret their functions to be purely managerial and to be leaders and administrators of schools. Thus, whilst some understanding of instructional leadership was apparent in some of the principals’ responses, it is the authors’ views that ACESLM, as a leadership development programme, needs to be redesigned to include greater focus on instructional leadership.

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