Leadership development: School principals' portfolios as an instrument for change

This paper uses principals' portfolios to examine how they learnt, sought to learn and can learn leadership. Leadership development has become a topical matter in education. However, there is still much debate about what constitutes effective leadership development. In South Africa, the Department of Education in conjunction with higher education institutions introduced the Advanced Certificate in Education (ACE) (School Leadership) programme to capacitate school principals and other education managers in developing skills, knowledge and values needed to effectively lead and manage schools. As part of their course requirements, school principals were expected to develop a portfolio to demonstrate change on their part regarding school leadership and management competences. This paper explores the portfolio as an instrument for change in school principals' leadership learning. Working within an interpretive research paradigm and employing a qualitative methodological approach, a sample of 18 portfolios of a possible 88 was selected using stratified random sampling. In analysing the portfolios, a multi-layered approach, commencing from a manifest to a more in-depth or latent interrogation of the evidence in the portfolio was employed. The findings indicate that the portfolio is indeed a tool for effecting change regarding principals' leadership for learning.