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Original research article, resilience, reorientation, and reinvention: school leadership during the early months of the covid-19 pandemic.

• 1 Leadership for Educational Organizations, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, CO, United States
• 2 Cherry Creek School District, Greenwood Village, CO, United States

As the COVID-19 pandemic spread rapidly across the globe, many schools struggled to react both quickly and adequately. Schools were one of the most important societal institutions to be affected by the pandemic. However, most school leaders have little to no training in crisis leadership, nor have they dealt with a crisis of this scale and this scope for this long. This article presents our findings from interviews of 43 school organizations around the globe about their responses during the early months of the pandemic. Primary themes from the interviews included an emphasis on vision and values; communication and family community engagement; staff care, instructional leadership, and organizational capacity-building; equity-oriented leadership practices; and recognition of potential future opportunities. These findings resonate with the larger research literature on crisis leadership and have important implications for school leaders’ future mindsets, behaviors, and support structures during crisis incidents.

The news headlines became increasingly alarmist in the early months of 2020. In late January the New York Times asked, “Is the world ready for the coronavirus?” ( Editorial Board, 2020 ). A month later the Los Angeles Times headline read, “Coronavirus spread in United States is inevitable, CDC warns” ( Shalby, 2020 ). As the COVID-19 pandemic intensified, schools were forced to take notice. In a front-page article, the writers at Education Week noted that school districts were “likely to be on the front lines in efforts to limit [the virus’] impact” ( Superville, 2020 , p. 1).

By mid-March it was clear that the virus was going global. School systems across the planet began to close and the Washington Post headline read, “Coronavirus now a global pandemic as United States world scramble to control outbreak” ( Zezima et al., 2020 ). Early outbreaks in China and Italy led to drastic societal lockdowns in Southeast Asia and Europe. The rest of the world soon followed.

Most school systems were caught flatfooted, despite the fact that many locations had several months warning. School boards and administrators dithered about what to do. Government support for schools and families was ambiguous. Uncertainty reigned everywhere. The global pandemic spread rapidly and most schools struggled to react both quickly and adequately. Schools in the United States began to close in early March whether they were ready or not ( Lieberman, 2020 ) and several weeks later America faced “a school shutdown of historic proportions” ( Sawchuk, 2020 , p. 12). Today COVID-19 continues to spread across the planet, with many countries–including the United States–facing their worst rates of infection and death to date ( Schnirring, 2020 ). While some schools are fully open, others have closed again or have moved to remote instruction for nearly all of their students ( Gewertz and Sawchuk, 2020 ).

By now it is evident that the global pandemic has created an unprecedented challenge for school leaders. Although principals and superintendents are used to handling smaller crises such as fights in the hallway, a leaky boiler, irate parents, disagreements over budgetary choices, or even a scandal concerning a local educator, most school leaders have never dealt with a crisis of this scale and this scope for this long. Even the immediacy of larger crises that often force school closures–such as a large snowstorm, a hurricane, or a school shooting–typically expires after a few days or weeks. Like no other crisis before, the COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated the deficiencies of our educational systems and the lack of administrator preparation regarding crisis leadership. As the pandemic continues to stretch the outer limits of our individual and institutional resiliency, this article is an attempt to understand the responses of P-12 school leaders around the world during those first few critical months.

Review of the Literature

The literature base on crisis leadership has been broadly consistent for decades. Often drawn from the government, military, business, or health sectors, several key themes and leadership behaviors regularly emerge from the scholarly research. In the sections below, we briefly describe what we seem to know about leadership during crisis situations, both in education and across other societal sectors.

What Is Crisis Leadership?

Since crises occur regularly in the lives of organizations, several researchers have attempted to create conceptual models and sense-making frameworks to help leaders and institutions think about effective leadership during crisis events. Boin et al. (2013) created one of the most comprehensive crisis leadership frameworks. Noting that crisis episodes bring out instant “winners” and “losers” when it comes to leadership, they articulated ten key executive tasks that accompany successful crisis management. Initial tasks include early recognition of the crisis, sensemaking in conditions of uncertainty, and making critical decisions. Other tasks include vertical and horizontal coordination within the organization and across organizations, as well as coupling and decoupling systems as necessary. Other critical tasks include robust communication, helping others engage in meaning-making for others, and, finally, reflecting on and learning from the crisis and rendering accountability regarding what worked and what did not. The authors noted that the overall goal of a leader should be to increase organizational resilience before, during, and after a crisis (pp. 82–87). Each of these executive tasks has been unpacked in further detail in the scholarly literature and most of the elements in the framework from Boin, Kuipers, and Overdijk occur frequently in others’ conceptual models (see, e.g., Smith and Riley, 2012 ; Dückers et al., 2017 ).

As noted by Boin et al. (2013) , one of the most consistent elements of crisis leadership appears to be sensemaking in conditions of uncertainty. During a crisis, challenges arise quickly and both information and known solutions may be scarce. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, some of the key challenges for school leaders were the unique nature of the crisis (i.e., most school organizations have not experienced a pandemic), the rapid timeline, and the accompanying uncertainty that hindered effective responses. Leaders’ experience mattered little when the COVID crisis had few “knowable components” ( Flin, 1996 ; Kahneman and Klein, 2009 ; Klein, 2009 ). Boin and Renaud (2013) articulated that joint sensemaking is “particularly important to effective crisis management: if decision makers do not have a shared and accurate picture of the situation, they cannot make informed decisions and communicate effectively with partners, politicians, and the public” (p. 41). Unfortunately for many school leaders during the first months of the pandemic, policymakers–and often the administrators above those leaders in the organizational hierarchy–often lacked an accurate picture of what was occurring, nor did they share what they knew with others in ways that enabled effective leadership responses and partnerships. Anecdotal stories abound of front-line educators and administrators struggling to get information and guidance during the pandemic’s first few months from those above them in the school system or from their local, state, and federal politicians.

Another consistent element of crisis leadership is effective communication, and numerous scholars have emphasized the leader’s role in communicating with both internal and external audiences. Marsen (2020) noted that crisis communication must deal with both issue management during the crisis and reputation management after the crisis. In their handbook on crisis communication, Heath and O’Hair (2020) emphasized that good communication is critically important because of the social nature of a leader’s work and because crisis management is inherently a collective activity. Effective communication builds trust and helps to create shared understandings and commitments across stakeholders ( Lucero et al., 2009 ). During times of crisis, effective leaders engage in holding , which means that they are containing and interpreting what is happening during a time of uncertainty. As Petriglieri (2020) noted:

Containing refers to the ability to soothe distress and interpreting to the ability to help others make sense of a confusing predicament… [Leaders] think clearly, offer reassurance, orient people, and help them stick together. That work is as important as inspiring others. In fact, it is a precondition for doing so.

Another important finding regarding crisis leadership is that what constitutes effective leadership often changes over the time span of the crisis ( Hannah et al., 2009 ). As conditions shift and new needs emerge, leaders must be flexible and adaptive ( Smith and Riley, 2012 ). During the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, most school leaders progressed through several key response phases ( McLeod, 2020b ). Phase 1 represented a focus on basic needs and included feeding children and families, ensuring student access to computing devices and the Internet, and checking in on families’ wellbeing. During Phase 2, administrators reoriented their schools to deliver instruction remotely. This work included training teachers in new pedagogies and technologies, as well as establishing instructional routines and digital platforms to facilitate online learning. Once schools began to settle into new routines, leaders then could begin paying attention to richer, deeper learning opportunities for students (Phase 3) and look ahead to future opportunities and help their organizations be better prepared for future dislocations of schooling (Phase 4). This latter phase is what many scholars have identified as a reconstruction ( Boin and Hart, 2003 ) or adaptive Prewitt et al., 2011 ) stage of crisis leadership (see also Coombs, 2000 ; Heath, 2004 ; Jaques, 2009 ; Smith and Riley, 2012 ).

Finally, some researchers have noted the importance of leaders’ attention to social and emotional concerns during a crisis (see, e.g., Meisler et al., 2013 ). After finding that “the psychosocial dimension of crises has received little attention in crisis management literature” (p. 95), Dückers et al. (2017) created a conceptual model of psychosocial crisis management that emphasized such leadership and organizational tasks as “providing information and basic aid” and “promoting a sense of safety, calming, self- and community efficacy, connectedness to others, and hope” (p. 101). The authors noted that effective crisis leadership involves more than effective communication and response coordination and also must attend to the general wellbeing and health of employees and other stakeholders.

Crisis Leadership in Schools

The literature cited here from other contexts also is applicable to school systems. During a crisis, school leaders–like their counterparts in other institutions–must engage in effective communication, facilitate sensemaking in conditions of uncertainty, be flexible and adaptive, and pay attention to the emotional wellbeing and health of employees. The executive tasks described by Boin et al. (2013) are relevant for school organizations and their leaders, just as they are in other societal sectors. In addition to the more generalized research base, some crisis leadership research has been conducted on school settings specifically. For instance, Smith and Riley (2012) recognized that school administrators’ crisis leadership is very different from that necessary to be successful in a more “normal” school environment. They also noted that critical attributes of effective crisis leadership in schools include:

The ability to cope with–and thrive on–ambiguity; a strong capacity to think laterally; a willingness to question events in new and insightful ways; a preparedness to respond flexibly and quickly, and to change direction rapidly if required; an ability to work with and through people to achieve critical outcomes; the tenacity to persevere when all seems to be lost; and a willingness to take necessary risks and to “break the rules” when necessary (p. 65).

In a study of school principals’ actions after the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, Mutch (2015b) articulated a three-factor conceptual model of school crisis leadership. The first factor was dispositional and included school leaders’ values, belief systems, personality traits, skills, and areas of expertise. The second factor was relational and included leaders’ visioning work as well as fostering collaboration, building trust, enabling empowerment, and building a sense of community. The final factor was situational , which included understanding both the past and immediate contexts, adapting to changing needs, thinking creatively, and providing direction for the organization. In her case studies of four elementary schools, Mutch identified specific leadership actions that fell under each of these factors. In a separate article that same year, Mutch (2015a) noted that schools with an inclusive culture and with strong relationships beforehand are better situated to manage crises that may occur.

Many researchers have noted the importance of maintaining trust during a crisis (see, e.g., Mutch, 2015a ; Dückers et al., 2017 ). Sutherland (2017) examined leadership behaviors in light of a school crisis caused by the accidental deaths of two students on a service-learning trip. Utilizing Tschannen-Moran and Hoy’s (2000) model of trust in schools, Sutherland found that closely held, non-consultative decision-making by top executives eroded the school’s ability to communicate effectively and thus hindered trust in the larger school community. He also found that subsequent implementation of new communication structures fostered better collaboration and rebuilt trust with educators and families. Sutherland’s findings are relevant for school leaders who have struggled to balance often-conflicting parent and educator expectations during the pandemic and thus have seen community trust erode as a result.

Mahfouz et al. (2019) studied Lebanese principals and schools as they responded to the international Syrian refugee crisis. They noted that “instead of focusing on leadership and academic performance, principals [faced with a large influx of Syrian refugee families spent] most of their time “putting out fires,” resolving urgent issues, and attending to basic needs that typically are taken for granted in other schools” (p. 24). Those challenges resemble the lived experiences of many principals and superintendents during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Crisis Leadership in Schools During the Pandemic

Some very recent publications have attempted to apply principles of crisis leadership to the COVID-19 pandemic in non-educational sectors. For instance, Pearce et al. (2021) employed leadership concepts from the military to the global pandemic, identifying some “key components of mission command” as unity of effort, freedom of action, trust, and rapid decision making (pp. 1–2). These leadership concepts are similar to a list identified for public health officials several years ago, which also emphasized trust, decisiveness with flexibility, and the ability to coordinate diverse stakeholders ( Deitchman, 2013 ).

Contemporary research on leadership in schools during the COVID-19 pandemic is starting to emerge as well. Although it is still relatively early to make sense of schools’ responses to the pandemic, scholars are beginning to try to understand the early phases of the crisis. Much of this work has been theoretical or conceptual, however, rather than empirical. For instance, Bagwell (2020) noted that the pandemic “is rapidly redefining schooling and leadership” (p. 31) and advocated for leaders to lead adaptively, build organizational and individual resilience, and create distributed leadership structures for optimal institutional response. Likewise, Netolicky (2020) noted many of the tensions that school leaders are facing during the pandemic. These tensions range from the need to lead both fast and slow, to balancing equity with excellence and accountability, to considering both human needs and organizational outcomes.

During the pandemic, Fernandez and Shaw (2020) recommended that academic leaders focus on best practices, try to see opportunities in the crisis, communicate clearly, connect with others, and distribute leadership within the organization. Harris and Jones (2020) offered seven propositions for consideration and potential research attention, including the ideas that “most school leadership preparation and training programs… are likely to be out of step with the challenges facing school leaders today” and that “self-care and consideration must be the main priority and prime concerns for all school leaders” (p. 245). They also recognized that “crisis and change management are now essential skills of a school leader… [that] require more than routine problem solving or occasional firefighting” (p. 246).

In one of the few empirical studies to emerge so far on pandemic-era school leadership, Rigby et al. (2020) identified three promising practices for P-12 school systems: treating families as equal partners in learning, continuing to provide high-quality learning opportunities for students, and decision-making that is coordinated, coherent, and inclusive. Through their interviews of thirteen central office leaders in the Puget Sound area of Washington, they also made three recommendations, which were for school districts to focus on “building on” not “learning loss,” to prioritize relationships, and to create anti-racist, systemic coherence (p. 6). Regarding their first recommendation, they noted that “this is an opportunity to design systems to understand and build on what children learned (and continue to learn) at home” (p. 6).

As the pandemic progresses, there is a clear need for more empirical research on the effects of COVID-19 on schools and other institutions. Educational scholars and school leaders need evidence from the field to inform the theoretical and conceptual approaches that have dominated during the first months of the global crisis.

The exploratory research in this study involved interviews with school leaders from across the United States and in nine other countries. The interview series was not originally conceived as a research study. Instead, it originated as a series of informal recorded conversations that were dubbed the Coronavirus Chronicles and posted on the blog of one of the authors ( McLeod, 2020a ). Participants gave consent prior to their interviews to make their conversations public in this manner. A YouTube channel was created to host the videos. The interviews also were posted as audio recordings on several podcast hosting services, including Apple, Spotify, and SoundCloud. All interviews were publicized through the blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media channels. The goal was to make the interviews accessible to other school leaders who might find them informative and to make the interview series subscribable for those who wished to receive regular updates. As the number of interviews grew, we began to receive requests to identify larger themes that cut across the conversations and to delineate specific leadership behaviors that seemed to be useful during the crisis. We agreed that might be helpful to others and received permission from the Colorado Multiple Institutional Review Board to begin thinking about these interviews as a qualitative research study.

Because of the organic evolution of this project, the participants for this study were selected through convenience sampling. Convenience sampling is “a type of non-probability sampling in which people are sampled simply because they are “convenient” sources of data for researchers” ( Lavrakas, 2008 ). Convenience sampling was employed in this study for several reasons. Because the global pandemic was a particularly stressful event for schools and their administrators, the earliest interviewees were chosen based on personal connections and school leaders’ resultant willingness to make time for a conversation. As visibility of the Coronavirus Chronicles interview series grew, we also began to receive requests from others to participate. The blog posts that accompanied each new interview solicited viewers and listeners to participate in the series if they were interested and multiple school leaders took us up on that offer. At times we purposefully extended invitations to certain schools. For instance, we invited a series of international schools in order to get a spread of perspectives across multiple continents. We also invited several project- and inquiry-based learning schools to share their experiences, which we thought might be different from more traditional school systems. Accordingly, the results of this study may not be generalizable to other schools or school leaders, and care should be taken when interpreting our participants’ responses. Nonetheless, we believe that the information provided by the school leaders who participated in this interview series has value for other educational administrators, particularly as they consider their own leadership behaviors and support structures during this worldwide crisis.

We interviewed a total of 55 educators from 43 school organizations. Eleven of those institutions were international schools and the other 32 schools, districts, and educational programs were based in the United States. Three different schools in China were selected because the COVID-19 virus appeared to originate there, schools in that country were the first in the world to close down, and we thought that their early responses would be informative to schools in other countries for whom the virus was just starting to influence decision-making. We made some attempt to loosely sample a cross section of America, and we eventually talked with school leaders in 21 different states. Most of our interviewees were principals, superintendents, or central office administrators. A few were teachers or instructional coaches.

All interviews were conducted using the Zoom videoconferencing software platform and were scheduled at times convenient for all participants. The intent of the interviews was to gain an understanding of how interviewees’ school organizations were responding during the early months of the global pandemic. As Kvale (1996) noted, personal interviews are a particularly powerful method for “studying people’s understanding of the meaning in their lived world” (p. 105). We were particularly interested in hearing about what learning and teaching looked like in participants’ schools as they shifted into remote instructional modalities. We also asked these school leaders to describe the decisions made by their leadership teams that seemed to work well during this difficult time, and they told us about some of the challenges and opportunities that they foresaw in the months to come. Additionally, many of the interviewees shared with us their immediate personal and institutional responses in the earliest days and weeks surrounding the closure of their schools.

We utilized a semi-structured approach for the qualitative interviews in this study ( Yin, 2011 ). First, the relationships between ourselves and our interviewees were not strictly scripted. The interviews had a few standard questions but the wording of the questions, the wording of the follow-up questions, and the order in which the questions were asked varied according to the flow of each discussion. Second, the interviews were conducted informally rather than in a scripted style, allowing each interview to be personalized and to provide a more casual dialogue between subject and interviewer. Third, we primarily asked open-ended questions so that participants would offer more rich detail in their responses. Interviews lasted from 9 to 20 min and were intentionally kept short so that episodes might fit more easily within participants’, viewers’, and listeners’ busy work lives.

All interviews were transcribed using NoNotes, a secure third-party transcription service. Corrections were made to the transcriptions as necessary. We determined an initial set of codes through ongoing, open, inductive coding. We then engaged in selective coding to validate the relationships between themes against the data. Through this process, the initial set of codes and subcodes were refined and expanded based on the data set. Coding was conducted both jointly and individually. However, we reviewed each others’ coding and collaborated on the coding scheme until consensus was reached.

Although there were a few common, open-ended questions to spark discussion, conversations with our 55 participants ranged widely. In the sections below, we describe the main themes that emerged from our coding and analysis of the 43 Coronavirus Chronicles interviews. Our participants shared with us that centering their crisis leadership work around the school’s vision, leaning on individual and institutional values, and deploying robust communication and family engagement strategies were all critically important. Our interviewees also were deeply engaged in attempts to care for staff and build their capacity through instructional leadership and professional learning activities. The schools leaders who we interviewed approached their work during the early months of the pandemic with a strong equity lens, and many of them saw the potential emergence of future organizational opportunities despite their present challenges and struggles.

Vision and Values

When faced with a true crisis, a strong organizational vision founded on clear values enables school leaders to respond in intentional and highly effective ways. The critical importance of these foundational structures cannot be overstated. Successful outcomes of responsive decisions made during critical moments of a crisis depend on the strength and clarity of a school organization’s underlying values and vision. As noted in the research literature on crisis leadership, leading from a strong organizational vision and institutional values facilitates administrators’ sensemaking in conditions of uncertainty, guides critical decisions, enables coherent communication, and helps school leaders engage others in shared meaning-making ( Boin et al., 2013 ).

For example, the school district administrators that we interviewed from Bismarck, North Dakota told us that they knew they needed to approach their response to the COVID-19 crisis with careful and intentional planning, citing “the old African proverb if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go slow and go together.” These administrators and their teams took time to identify a “coherent, long-term plan of how [they] would like to approach the work for distance learning.” Organizational decision-making frameworks based on their values guided district- and school-level leadership teams as they moved forward with their response plans.

Tanna, a director of technology innovation, stated that time and identification of core values were critical as she identified the importance of relationships:

[R]eally taking some time to think about what are the core principles and different pieces of this? What are the… frames that we run decisions through? So that’s been tremendously helpful as you get more and more variables and other decisions that you’re making just to be calibrated on what do we really care about? And so, I think we… really tapped into what the Chinese schools… had been doing… being very vulnerable and being willing to share… I’ve been so grateful for the sharing and the generosity of educators around the world sharing things, and people have been very open and asking questions.

As educators around the world empathized with one another, there also was universal adherence to the value of empathy for students and families. Empathy drove immediate action focused on basic student and family needs such as providing food pickup and delivery. Gerald, a middle school principal, captured the breadth of his school’s empathetic approach: “We did take some time in the beginning to recognize that we care about relationships. That’s staff relationships and student and family relationships.”

Other core values surfaced early in the crisis response process for many schools. In addition to identifying the importance of relationships as they framed their planning and decision-making processes, our participants identified connectivity, collective wisdom, collaboration, empathy, adaptation, and risk-taking as values that drove their responses to the pandemic.

The importance of maintaining and strengthening relationships and connectivity between students and teachers, administrators and teachers, and administrators, teachers and families, became a clear first priority for many educational institutions. Relationships and connectivity resonate throughout educational settings because these values form the foundation of strong school communities and student success. As stated succinctly by Mary Beth, a director of educational technology, “we know those relationships are key to students feeling connected and successful.” Moreover, by identifying these values, the door to reimagining education in a remote setting opened up a little. Shannon, an English teacher in Amsterdam, shared her excitement about the evolution of this process:

We’ve talked a lot about community building and how to build a community in this virtual world and stay connected, and then I think in terms of teachers… really thinking that we can’t teach in the same way. So how are we going to reimagine our teaching practice? So I think a lot of us that wanted to do like a flipped classroom, but never found the time or wanted to set up Google Groups or Meets or whatever, well, we have time now, we have to do that… and I keep thinking that even though this has been really stressful time for educators and students and parents, there’s some really nice things that have come out of this… to reimagine the way we do things.

While establishing a clear focus on relationships and community connection came quickly to many organizations, the inextricably linked values of collective wisdom and collaboration also brought directional clarity into view. Ben, an assistant superintendent, recognized early on in the crisis that “there is a lot of collective wisdom not only across [the] district, but through everyone’s personal learning network.” Aaron, a head of school, echoed the important contributions of the broader educational community when he acknowledged that his institution “benefited from having a strong network of schools, locally and nationally, that we could bounce ideas off of, [and] like any good teacher, steal ideas [from] and make them our own.”

Accessing the collective wisdom of the educational community also permeated the international community. International schools in particular benefited from their global network. John, an international school deputy principal, approached the international educational community with vulnerability and deep gratitude:

We have a very rich, professional learning network amongst the international schools. [I]t’s about being patient, being kind to others and to yourself, and recognizing that in this chaos there’s a lot of really good things that can happen and we have to keep our most vulnerable a hundred percent in the forefront of our minds. If there’s any way we can take this and put more resources and more support for our most vulnerable learners, then the results are going to be good and that has to be our priority.

Ultimately, all of the values-based crisis responses could only occur if leaders modeled and encouraged adaptive practices and risk-taking solutions. Jori, a dean of students, explained:

I think what we’re finding is we’re learning something new every day and that it’s okay. Just like we tell our students that we’re looking for growth over time and it’s not always just about the end product, it’s growth over time for us and we are trying new things. Daily, I get emails from teachers or a phone call, “Hey, I found this, I’m going to try it with my students.” The answer is always, “Yes, please. Try something new.” Take risks, which are another thing that we’re asking our kids to do, we’re asking our staff to do, too.

The power of a values-driven approach to crisis management clearly resonated with our participants. This approach resulted in actionable responses to the COVID-19 pandemic that were founded on the values of relationship, connectivity, collective wisdom, collaboration, empathy, and adaptive risk-taking.

Communication and Family Community Engagement

The need for all educational organizations to communicate effectively with their stakeholders became paramount as the global pandemic forced every institution into remote learning. As expected from the research literature (see, e.g., Lucero et al., 2009 ; Boin et al., 2013 ; Heath and O’Hair, 2020 ), the leaders who we interviewed recognized instantly that communication in all forms was a critical component of navigating the rapidly changing uncertainty that they faced.

In the initial stages of the COVID-19 crisis response, educational leaders identified the need for frequent, often daily communication with teachers, students and parents. Communication came from every level of educational organizations immediately. Cory, a superintendent, wrote an update for his entire district every day and even led a parade through every community in the district to launch his communication efforts:

I write a daily memo to our entire district every day. And about three quarters of it is positivity. I highlight things our kids are doing that teachers put in and say, “Hey, these kids handed all their work, and I put that on the memo.” And I highlight positive emails parents send us. We have been flooded with positivity from them. We’ve had to approach a couple things differently… We held a parade. And because we basically serve eight communities, I’m afraid it was 75 miles long and four and a half hours long, and we drove in every community.

Many school leaders also created daily lines of communication with teachers, students, and parents. Danny, an international middle school principal, ensured connection across the entire community by communicating with everyone on a daily basis:

The other key piece that we do is we communicate with the parents. Every single day a letter from me. It’s actually an Adobe Spark note with a short opening from me and then it has pictures of student work they submit during the day. We have our school spirit theme weeks. So every single day something goes home to all the parents, all the students, [and] all the teachers that is a message from me: here’s how we’re doing, here’s where we are, here’s where we’re going, and then it celebrates student work, it celebrates the teacher’s work, there are video clips, and it just connects everyone back to school and parents and kids.

Phone calls became one of the most important initial methods of reaching out to students and families. The personal nature of voice-to-voice connection became an essential component of the difficult transition to remote learning. Gerald, a middle school principal, emphasized “that all communications with home had to be through the home room teacher” to maintain close connections between students and teachers. That investment in maintaining those connections paid “huge dividends” as remote learning began, although it took quite a toll on teachers due to initial phone calls often lasting for hours as teachers comforted and reassured frightened parents and families.

Structures and systems of communication that existed prior to the pandemic were relied upon heavily to ensure that meaningful connections were maintained. Office hours, regular class meetings, and daily or weekly student check-ins became the official norm for many schools. As clearly stated by Jeff, a department chair, the “number one priority going forward to the end of the school year [is] getting a hold of every student we can and then making sure that we’re regularly staying in contact.”

The importance of feedback in a school’s communication strategy was recognized as a critical component of managing the challenges of remote learning. Mary Beth, a director of educational technology, shared that “we’re listening regularly to our parents, we’re listening to our teachers, and we’re listening to our students.” Feedback in the form of parent and student surveys were important to Cory, a superintendent:

You let people share. You connect with them relationship-wise… we survey our parents and kids every other week. Every teacher surveys them. We grab that information and then we look at it. We make small adjustments. Our educators have been fantastic about really meeting the needs of parents… [and] kids.”

Communication at all levels and between all stakeholders was enhanced by the use of technological tools. Tanna, a director of technology innovation, relayed the early discussions about the tools necessary for supporting clear communication and learning:

So from a technology standpoint, we spent most of the first week that we knew about this [pandemic] really promoting and talking about the communication and the connectivity tools that we have… in a digital environment. And to and from us and families, and setting that up. and helping people practice with those tools. Because without that, we can’t really advance the distance learning pieces.

These communication tools included district learning management systems such as Google Classroom, Schoology, and Canvas; collaboration tools such as Seesaw, Microsoft Teams, and Google Apps for Education; videoconferencing tools such as Zoom and Google Meet; social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok; and many others. While a plethora of digital tools were available to almost everyone, the majority of schools chose to focus on using tools that were familiar to staff in order to, as Shameka, a high school principal said, reduce family confusion and make it “so much easier for us to communicate.”

The importance of clear, constant, and effective communication was universally recognized by all school leaders as an essential component to a successful transition to remote learning. Establishing and maintaining clear channels of communication became a universal goal of the educational leaders whom we interviewed.

Staff Care, Instructional Leadership, and Organizational Capacity-Building

As the pandemic crisis manifested, educational leaders around the globe quickly identified the importance of taking care of the needs of their staff. Jeff, the chief administrator for a regional educational service agency, spoke for many when he stated, “our first and foremost priority was making sure our own people [were] okay.” Knowing that building capacity would come later, many school leaders approached their staff with an eye for compassion and grace rather than compliance. Glenn, a superintendent, said that his district’s primary ask of staff members was, “What can we do for you?” These leadership approaches align tightly with the research that underscores the importance of leaders’ attention to social and emotional concerns during a crisis (see, e.g., Meisler et al., 2013 ; Dückers et al., 2017 ).

As people in organizations began to come together, the need for connection among staff members became paramount. Virtual time for connection through general staff meetings where celebrations and challenges were shared became commonplace. In addition, creative virtual social activities began to emerge as a stand-in for informal, face-to-face interactions and a way to maintain relationships and connection. Humor was highly valued, as demonstrated by the staff challenge at Shameka’s high school. The competition was fierce around which educators had the most toilet paper in their homes (in light of a national, never-understood panic run on the commodity). Shameka’s school also hosted open discussion hours for staff, which often diverged into lighthearted but energetic conversations about topics such as “What is the best flavor of ramen noodles?” These staff bonding events solidified the ties between educators and created strong foundations upon which instructional capacity could be built.

Attention to mindset, fluid roles and expectations, responsive professional development, and efficiency and prioritization of structures and systems all formed the basis of our participants’ efforts to build, sustain, and strengthen capacity across their organizations. Setting the stage for capacity building began with clarifying and embracing a mindset of acceptance and support. Dan, a director of learning innovation, described this important component:

[G]race and flexibility, and I think that goes all the way around. Teachers toward their students, students toward their teachers, parents toward the school community, and… our administrators… they’ll come back to that grace and flexibility as far as what happens with kids, and teachers in their new virtual environments, knowing that it’s not going to be perfect. And we always, in the tech world, we always talk about risk, right? We take these risks, and now people are being forced to do that. Because some type of people didn’t maybe necessarily before, now you’re being forced to do that and be okay with it. Reflect, change what happens tomorrow if it didn’t work out right. If it worked out, great, do it again, right? So, grace and flexibility.

After recognizing the importance of infusing capacity-building with grace and flexibility, leaders began creating specific supports for teachers, including an “all hands on deck approach” to staffing and responsive professional development. Tanna, a director of technology innovation, summed up this part of the process when she stated, “It’s about helping all teachers be able to feel comfortable and be vulnerable as learners.”

At many of our interviewees’ schools, all non-teaching staff members were leveraged to help create supports for students, thereby increasing teachers’ capacity to focus on instructional practices. Bus drivers, cafeteria managers, and librarians were among the many who joined forces to create support structures. During a planned meal pickup event, Andrea, a superintendent, said that her librarians found a creative way to support students:

Yesterday at our meal pickup we had our librarians, two librarians, who had pulled a bunch of books out of their libraries that students could check out on the curb. I would say the creativity is just fantastic.

With staff and student supports in place, professional development became a key strategic component for building teacher capacity. Jeff, the chief administrator for a regional educational service agency, recognized the unique opportunity presented by the crisis, noting that, “we have some time now that internal staff could do some learning that maybe we’ve been wanting to do all year long and just never have that extra time.”

Training on technological tools dominated professional learning early in the pandemic. For example, one school district in Colorado offered 25 training sessions on Google Classroom the day before the district went live with remote learning. The critical importance of this type of training, especially for teachers without these skills, became obvious. As Dan, a director of learning and innovation, shared:

We do have a… we’ll call it an opt-in sort of PD model for most things, technology being one of those. And there are a handful of teachers who are struggling right now because they [had previously] opted out. They are more traditional teachers… we’ve had our beginner Google Classroom sessions where we’re full of those people… but not as many from some friends I have in other districts who say they’ve never used Google Classroom.

Over time, professional learning at many of our interviewees’ institutions expanded from an almost-pure technology focus to include mental health, trauma, social-emotional learning, and–as time went on and teacher capacity grew–virtual instructional strategies. Jeff, a high school principal, summed up the experience of staff learning:

This is the best real life, real-time professional development… there is a constant feedback loop. This is what we’re trying and is this going to work or is that going to work? We’re getting a lot of information. At some point when the world stops spinning we’ll have to sit down and take everything we’ve learned and think about how we’re moving forward.

Maximizing efficiency of prioritized structures and systems was another area of focus for instructional capacity building. Simplicity and familiarity were embraced when it came to selecting learning management systems, and this paid off for many organizations. As Dave, a director of technology integration, noted:

What’s working well is that we’re trying to keep everything really super simple and keep tools that are familiar. So we’ve started with strengths, started with what the students are familiar with, so, getting a simple learning management system, making sure that it’s either Google Classroom or Seesaw. So, things that teachers are familiar with and they can support each other…

At many schools, schedules also were simplified in an effort to “stave off distance-learning fatigue,” as Danny, an international middle school principal, said. Staggered schedules with built-in flexibility allowed students and teachers to connect when needed during synchronous time. Options during asynchronous time allowed for necessities like individual or small group check-ins and work delivery times, as well as opportunities for students to reconnect with teachers as needed. Blair, an international secondary school principal, expressed his satisfaction by stating, “I think that we ended the year really well with a solid structure that allowed for both flexibility as well as enough structure to support students well.”

Many of our participants’ school systems also made decisions to increase instructional capacity by prioritizing essential standards. Mike, a director of curriculum and technology, astutely pointed out the issues that had to be addressed, noting that, “we are not going to be able to do everything. so what are the most important things for our learners?” As Melissa, a high school principal shared with us, prioritization of standards fostered new learning opportunities for students, robust staff conversations, and collaborative efforts about how to best garner available resources, including curriculum, to meet targeted learning goals.

Educators at one of our participating international schools created online “learning grids” to effectively accomplish this task. Don, an assistant head of school, explained that these grids were “user-friendly formats that really scripted what we needed kids to do and then what we’re requiring teachers to do.” This creative solution increased school capacity and facilitated easier school-to-home connections:

So it was a new way of collaborating for our teachers who… in a normal school… have a little bit more say in how they approach each of the learning standards that… they’re trying to reach. So that was a bit of learning as well to figure out how that collaboration would work. But it’s worked out really well and it certainly has simplified life, I think, for teachers as well. And it has freed them up to do more things… so that we could be sure that the basic resources are being shared and the standards are all being met through these learning grids.

Finally, as Sean, a digital specialist, described, attention could turn from emergency responsiveness to aspirational responsiveness as teacher capacity was built:

I think we have our aspirational goals and then we have the reality of the pandemic and the emergency happening. We’re starting to see some of those aspirational pieces take off as far as how content is designed and delivered. Our teachers are becoming a lot more confident in their ability to do this online, beginning to understand the routines that are useful for them as teachers and then routines for the students, and there’s a lot of feedback from our teachers going on about that.

The power of teacher collaboration, coupled with the familiarity of emerging routines and recognizable successes, empowered teachers at many of our participating schools. Best practices in brick-and-mortar settings often proved to be best practices in the virtual classroom. Small group and individualized instruction was critical, student-led project-based learning correlated with high engagement, and greater student agency equated with greater student success. This was particularly true in some of the schools that we interviewed which had project- and inquiry-based learning structures in place.

Ultimately, leaders who built capacity through attention to mindset, embraced fluid roles and expectations, facilitated responsive professional development, and prioritized efficient structures and systems were able to create environments for teachers to reach students in meaningful ways and increase engagement in virtual settings. As the initial crisis moved into a sustained “new normal,” organizations began finding ways to move from their initial state of emergency to a state of best practices.

Equity-Oriented Leadership

Across the globe, issues of educational access and digital equity were thrust into the forefront as schools scrambled to provide access to remote education platforms. Equity requires that every student be supported with the resources necessary to successfully access what is needed to learn and thrive in an educational setting. As the pandemic took hold, it became clear that access to food and mental health supports initially needed to take priority over access to instruction. Our school leaders’ emphasis on–and quick investments in–basic needs, social-emotional health, and technological access are underscored by the research literature’s recognition of these stabilizing aspects of crisis leadership (see, e.g., Smith and Riley, 2012 ; Mutch, 2015b ; Dückers et al., 2017 ; Mahfouz et al., 2019 ; McLeod, 2020b ).

Since access to at-school free meal programs was severed, feeding students in the community became paramount for many of our school leaders. Jim, a chief executive officer of a charter school, described the situation faced by so many schools:

We have about 98% of our kids on free and reduced-price lunch programs. So, you know, when we first got the information around the closure, our first instincts were to make sure we were feeding our kids–the most basic fundamental expectation of survival. And we were able to launch that in about 2 weeks. We started with the daily drive-thru, and then we’ve been able to move that to once a week, so we can supply 7 days worth of food to all of our families. We have a pre-heated meal system with distribution of food and gallons of milk every week. It’s going really well. We have about a 100% participation rate, almost everyone participates. We accept anyone under the age of 18 to come to our drive thru and pick up food, so it doesn’t even matter if they’re part of our school system or not.

Meeting families’ primary needs required school communities to adapt quickly and often. Glenn, a superintendent, shared:

As far as food services, we provide food twice a week, our communities are roughly about 45% free and reduced lunch. So, one of the biggest things that we are focusing on is the health and well-being of those families as well. So we constantly put out phone calls saying, “Hey, if you recently lost your job and or you think you’re now eligible, please sign up,” and we can go through that paperwork with them.

Mental health supports also were considered as the overall health and wellbeing of students and families was prioritized. Kristina, a principal, noted that “we really need to focus on the heart, on overall well-being and mental healthiness and physical healthiness.” Looking to the future, Kristina also expressed her grave concerns “about everyone’s mental health as this continues.”

After addressing students’ basic health needs, issues of instructional equity quickly came into focus. Nancy, a principal of an elementary International Baccalaureate school, summed up the issues faced by so many:

We had a lot of problems in the beginning getting kids on [the Internet]. The Internet wasn’t working correctly. They didn’t understand [how to use a] hotspot. Their iPad locked up, they couldn’t remember their password… We did a lot with our interpreters getting kids and families logged on… We called them. I was going to kid’s houses: “Why can’t you get on, let me help you?” You bring food, you bring whatever, because a lot of them were really scared when I came by. They [thought] because they weren’t online, [that I was there for] attendance but, no, I was there to help them.

Even for schools that had heavily invested in technology before the pandemic, issues of digital equity and data privilege quickly became a pressing concern. Shameka, a high school principal, explained:

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the concerns around digital equity because we still have to champion that. Just because a kid has access they don’t necessarily always have the digital capital necessary to engage in a way that is authentic… just because the kid has a phone doesn’t mean that they live in a place of data privilege. I have not had [a fixed set of] minutes on my phone or had to worry about data in years. I’m on an unlimited plan but when thinking about kids submitting assignments and families who share data… we live in a place of data privilege. And we have to recognize in that vein of digital equity [that] access is one thing, but not really… You don’t have access for real.

Again and again, school leaders discussed Internet access as one of the biggest hurdles students faced after moving to remote learning. Because access could not be assumed even when students had or were provided with devices, innovative and practical, equitable solutions were required. Aaron, a middle school assistant principal, discussed the need to use paper packets when it was understood that families, “had too many kids in the house, so that even if they had pretty decent Internet coverage, if three kids are connected at once, it certainly couldn’t stand up to that.” Dave, a director of technology integration, concurred by stating, “We’re learning about families who may not have the access that we thought they did.” In addition to the Internet access hurdles faced by so many students, the ability of schools to continue to support devices also quickly surfaced. Dave noted, “I think the challenges now are helping to manage and support those devices virtually, making sure that we know that everybody has what they need, [and] finding out where those gaps exist.”

Unsurprisingly, issues of equity persisted during the global pandemic crisis. Even if basic student needs for food were met, mental health supports and digital resources often were woefully inadequate. Many schools still have not been able to ensure that students’ overall well-being is adequately supported. Hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of students still cannot access instruction remotely. Educational access and equity issues that existed beforehand often seemed insurmountable during the early months of the pandemic. Educational equity for all students has never been a reality and now has slipped even further away for millions of students. Despite the enormity of the challenges, the school leaders we interviewed continued to strive to support students to the greatest extent possible.

Silver Linings and Future Opportunities

Despite the enormity of the challenges that COVID-19 has thrust upon P-12 educational systems, many of our interviewees felt that some “silver linings,” or unexpected positive outcomes, had begun to emerge, even during the first few months, that would lead to future opportunities for students and staff. These possibilities for change spurred excitement, even during this challenging time period for schools. Jeremy, a superintendent, acknowledged the call to action for all educational communities:

I think if we come out of this experience and fall back on traditional ways of doing things, shame on us. We cannot unlearn what we are learning right now. If anything, the silver lining here is that… that is pretty exciting to think about what could be. I know our teachers and students, and families are living that alongside us. That is probably one of the highlights we have seen.

Jeff, the chief administrator for a regional educational service agency, noted that the global pandemic and the concurrent changes in school structures and activities have given everyone the permission to “think about the future of education,” and to question the status quo . Changes in almost every area of education are being considered, including new commitments to the collective wisdom of the educational community, new structures of family engagement, expansive integration of technology, the creation of new resources, and, most importantly, a new appreciation and recognition of student voice and self-directed agency. Past research indicates that organizational reorientations are common as crises begin to settle down and leaders have the opportunity to reflect on the future of their institutions (see, e.g., Coombs, 2000 ; Boin and Hart, 2003 ; Heath, 2004 ; Jaques, 2009 ; Smith and Riley, 2012 ).

The school leaders that we interviewed had a renewed recognition of–and appreciation for–the importance of the collective wisdom of the educational community. Mike, a director of curriculum and technology, described his experience:

I think there are some really good positives that have come from this experience… there is a lot of sharing going on and reconnecting with our personal learning networks has been fantastic… People are talking and sharing at a rapid pace so that there is a lot of crowdsourcing around that information. I think that has been really helpful.

The importance of connections between educators, and the opportunities created by those connections, cannot be overstated. Kristina, a principal, summed it up when she said, “If this [pandemic] has done nothing else, [it has shown us that] we need to work together in a connected world and leverage our shared brilliance, our shared experience.”

Another silver lining from the pandemic appears to have been the explosion of better technology integration across educational systems. Aaron, a middle school assistant principal, recognized that educational communities have been thrust into a non-negotiable “technological immersion course”:

I think it has just upped our technology. You hear it all the time where, hey, if you want to learn a foreign language, go to that country and live there for 6 weeks. Well, if you want to learn online education… I wouldn’t want a pandemic. But certainly getting dropped into a situation where you have to do it for X number of weeks has just raised everyone’s level astronomically, and it forces you to ask questions. You come up against that reality. You have to troubleshoot things… And I think those things can carry forward…

Many of our interviewees said that they planned on carrying forward the creation of virtual resources for students and staff. While the availability of these resources is not new, the broad-based implementation and long-overdue recognition of the availability and potential benefits of these resources is a significant change for many educators.

The most-widely recognized silver lining of the COVID-19 pandemic is arguably the collective recognition of the power of community and the accompanying importance of valuing the voices of all community members, especially parents and students. Learning has become more visible to everyone. This increased transparency and visibility has the potential to change the face of education going forward. Mark, a director of an international school, said:

I think that the learning for all of our community members was so much more visible. Parents were part of the learning experience. Students were definitely advocates and agents in their own learning. And teachers, in order to deliver experiences, they had to be able to communicate much more actively with different groups… And I think the more that we can make our experiences visible and include the community members in those experiences, I think that that’s something that we can bring back to the on-campus instruction and try and support through a continued partnership to support our students.

Cory, a superintendent, noted that parents are seeing and experiencing more of “what their kids are doing in school than ever before” and, in turn, as educators have committed themselves to a new level of family engagement, they are seeing sides of their students previously unrecognized. He went on to state that remote learning has given students more voice and agency as they have been provided with opportunities to show their learning in new ways.

Students at many of the schools we interviewed are doing more than just showing their learning in new ways. Remote learning is changing students in ways that will benefit them in all areas of their lives. Danny, an international middle school principal, looked forward to these changes with excitement:

[O]ur students are certainly learning a lot of independent skills and making a lot of choices on their own right now and they’re pursuing a lot of their own interests because they have time to do it because they’re not on a regular school time schedule. So, when they come back to school, it will be very, very fun to capitalize on this new independence and this new confidence and this new self-assuredness of “Oh, yeah, I can do that.”

The school leaders we interviewed were able to see some “silver linings” and potential benefits that might emerge from a harrowing pandemic. Opportunities they identified included time to reimagine school, chances to test new ideas and take risks, and the ability to welcome back students who have embraced a new version of themselves.

Discussion and Implications

The primary themes that emerged from our interviews with the Coronavirus Chronicles participants echoed many of the broad ideas from the scholarly literature. Research is clear, for example, that a strong emphasis on organizational vision and institutional values facilitates leaders’ sensemaking and guides critical decisions during conditions of uncertainty (see, e.g., Prewitt et al., 2011 ; Boin et al., 2013 ). Similarly, the school leaders who we interviewed utilized a variety of focused but far-reaching communication strategies (see, e.g., Heath and O’Hair, 2020 ) to maintain some semblance of instructional and organizational coherence and to support educators and families. This coordination often involved outside entities. For instance, Glenn, a superintendent, shared with us:

Two weeks before this all really started coming down to southern New Jersey,… we put together a giant group of team meetings and we brought in our chiefs of police, fire, public works. We had our mayor in contact. We had our city manager, board of education, our administrators, and our food services. And we sat together as one big team and put all of our egos aside and said, “What do we need to do to work together as the months go on?” And we [continue to regularly] work together, hand-in-hand.

Care for others was another dominant theme that we heard from our interview participants, underscoring the importance of leaders’ attention to educators’ and families’ social, emotional, and mental health concerns (see, e.g., Dückers et al., 2017 ). Often that care focused on resolving fundamental inequities, particularly regarding food insecurity, counseling, social services, or technological access (see, e.g., Dückers et al., 2017 ; Mahfouz et al., 2019 ; McLeod, 2020b ).

A few other leadership observations emerged from our interviews that we think are worth noting here at the end of this article. First, our school leaders repeatedly recognized their reliance on the collective wisdom that exists across organizations and geographic boundaries. Schools that intentionally looked to what was happening elsewhere were able to be more proactive. These schools tapped into their collective networks and connected with colleagues in parts of the world that were among the first affected by the pandemic, thus allowing their organizations more time for conversation, planning, and response.

Second, schools that previously had made certain investments reaped the benefits during the pandemic ( Stern, 2013 ). One obvious example would be the schools that already had implemented 1:1 computing initiatives. These technology-rich systems were able to pivot to remote instruction more easily because most students already had computing devices and home Internet access. A second example would be the middle school that already had competency-based student progressions in place and thus was less concerned than other schools about student “learning loss.” Another example would be the project- and inquiry-based learning schools that we interviewed. Students in those schools already were comfortable with greater self-agency and directing their own work, a useful skill set for learning at home during the pandemic. Other examples include the international schools that had certain processes in place due to previous pandemics such as SARS or MERS or the schools in Alabama that had experience with quick shifts to online learning after hurricanes.

Third, we heard regularly about the ongoing importance of relationships. Sometimes these relationships were simply about coordination of organizational functions, similar to the meetings described above in Glenn’s New Jersey community. More often, however, they represented love, empathy, and care of both the school and the larger community. The educators who we interviewed did heroic work during the first few months of the pandemic to combat food insecurity, care for the people around them, and ensure that learning still occurred for children.

Fourth, many of our participants shared that their clear visions and values, whether individual or institutional, allowed them to maintain operational focus instead of simply being reactive to the ongoing, smaller, day-to-day crises that regularly occurred. Organizational responses that had greater consistency and coherency created fewer stresses on educators and families.

Fifth, schools continue to reflect the contexts of our larger society. For many of our participants, the equity concerns that existed pre-pandemic were magnified during the first few months of the crisis. Food and housing insecurity, digital inequity, and lack of access to mental health supports were all amplified after the pandemic closed down schools. There is a great need for equity-oriented leadership in both schools and their larger communities and political contexts. We need better investments, support systems, and policy approaches to offset the inequities that erode institutional and societal vitality.

Sixth, we were impressed with the resilience and courage that we witnessed from many of our participating educators. Even while struggling personally with the impacts of the pandemic, they still leaned into the immense challenges before them. They were brave enough to try new approaches and create new structures, even when they weren’t sure what would work. We heard numerous examples of individual and organizational risk-taking. Many of those new ideas, support systems, and skill sets will persist after the pandemic. For instance, teachers’ newly acquired technology skills won’t just disappear. Similarly, the increased participation rates that many schools witnessed once parent-teacher conferences went virtual are probably worth preserving.

Finally, some of our participants expressed optimism that the pandemic may radically reshape certain elements of their school systems once they have time to reflect back on what has happened. This reflection on organizational possibilities and institutional futures is common during the “reconstruction” phase ( Boin and Hart, 2003 ) of a crisis (see also Coombs, 2000 ; Heath, 2004 ; Boin et al., 2005 ; Jaques, 2009 ; Smith and Riley, 2012 ). Time will tell if these “silver linings” actually occur. Although many scholars have noted the revolutionary potential of major crises (see, e.g., Prewitt et al., 2011 ; Harris, 2020 ), Boin and Hart (2003) stated that there are inherent tensions between crisis management and reform-oriented leadership. During a crisis, leaders often try to “minimize the damage, alleviate the pain, and restore order” (p. 549), which conflicts with attempts to disrupt the organization and move it in a new direction. If some of these longer-term changes do indeed occur when the pandemic recedes, many of our interviewees will be ready to reap the promises of a newly reimagined world of education.

Crisis leadership matters, primarily because “it is often the handling of a crisis that leads to more damage than the crisis event itself. Learning from a crisis is the best hope we have of preventing repeat occurrences.” ( James and Wooten, 2011 , p. 61). When it comes to education however, Smawfield (2013) stated that “one of the most under-represented areas within the literature. is the capture of knowledge on how schools have been able to respond to real-life disasters” (p. 9). He noted that we have much still to learn about the leadership and institutional challenges that accompany crises, the roles that educators are required to play, and the structures and behaviors that seem to be successful.

Although this study examined school leaders’ responses during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mutch (2015b) noted that “12–24 months after the onset of [a crisis seems] to be a useful time to start to review what has happened” (p. 187). Much of what we will learn about effective school crisis leadership during this pandemic remains unknown and it will take years to reveal the longer-term impacts of COVID-19 on schools and their leaders. Harris and Jones (2020) stated that, “a new chapter is being written about school leadership in disruptive times that will possibly overtake and overshadow all that was written before on the topic” (p. 246). That chapter–and the overall story of pandemic-era schooling–continues to be written. For many of the schools that we interviewed, their reorientations and reinventions may well be underway.

Data Availability Statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Author Contributions

SM conducted all of the interviews. Both authors contributed equally to the coding, analysis, and writing of this manuscript. Both authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords : crisis leadership, school leadership, pandemic leadership, crisis management, COVID-19, schools, administrators, leadership

Citation: McLeod S and Dulsky S (2021) Resilience, Reorientation, and Reinvention: School Leadership During the Early Months of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Front. Educ. 6:637075. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2021.637075

Received: 02 December 2020; Accepted: 22 February 2021; Published: 12 March 2021.

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Copyright © 2021 McLeod and Dulsky. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Scott McLeod, [email protected]

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Education Leadership and the COVID-19 Crisis

Reframing Educational Leadership Research in the Twenty-First Century

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For the last three decades, reviews on instructional leadership have pointed to studies that predominantly adopted conventional social science research methodologies, specifically analytical tools, such as descriptive, causal factor, correlational and advanced modelling. These methods have constraints and limitations, which include that variable-based linear models measures are treated as ‘rigorously real’ measures of social reality, that individuals use rational deduction (ignoring the value premise of decision-making), and that individuals are treated as independent and individualized. This paper proposes and illustrates how research approaches of complexity science can be applied within the social system to address complex instructional leadership questions. Consequently, reframing instructional leadership research through the lens of complexity science provides the most viable approach to understand the adaptive processes and the dynamic system of schools.

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7.1 introduction.

Educational leadership research has come of age. From its fledgling start in 1960s under the overarching research agenda of educational administration for school improvement, the focus shifted to leadership research from the early 1990s (Boyan, 1981 ; Day et al., 2010 ; Griffiths, 1959 , 1979 ; Gronn, 2002 ; MacBeath & Cheng, 2008 ; Mulford & Silins, 2003 ; Southworth, 2002 ; Witziers, Bosker, & Kruger, 2003 ). Since then, educational leadership as a respected field began to flourish by the early 2000s (Hallinger, 2013 ; Robinson, Lloyd, & Rowe, 2008 ; Walker & Dimmock, 2000 ). From the 1980s up to the present time, the body of knowledge on educational leadership has grown tremendously to produce three distinctive educational leadership theories: Instructional leadership, transformational leadership, and distributed leadership. While it is undisputed that educational leadership research has indeed been productive, there is a sense that a narrowing labyrinth of researchable questions is approaching in particular to the first two educational leadership research theories. The evidence of this is implied in the concerted call to expand and situate educational leadership research in non-Western societies (Dimmock, 2000 ; Dimmock & Walker, 2005 ; Hallinger, 2011 ; Hallinger, Walker, & Bajunid, 2005 ). This call is valid in that there is still limited contribution to substantive theory building from non-Western societies. However, it also implies that Western societies’ focus on educational leadership has reached an optimum stage in publications and knowledge building. A more pertinent reason to rethink educational leadership research could be based on epistemological questions about the social science research paradigm that has been the foundation of educational leadership research. These questions will be expanded as the discussion proceeds on current approaches of educational leadership research.

This chapter has three goals: The first one is to map the data-analytical methods used in educational leadership research over the last thirty years (1980–2016). This investigation covers the research methodologies used in instructional leadership, transformational leadership, and distributed leadership.

Educational leadership studies are conducted in the social context of the school. This context involves complex social interactions between and among leaders, staff, parents, communities, partners, and students. In the last decade, there has been a consensus among scholars that schools have evolved to become more complex. Furthermore, there is a consensus among scholars to view complexity through increases in the number of actors and the interactions between them. The complexity of schools is evident in the rise in accountability and involvement from an expanding number of stakeholders involved, such as politicians, clinical professionals (who diagnose learning disabilities of students), communities, and educational resource providers (training and certifying institutions). The relations between stakeholders are non-linear and discontinuous, so even small changes in variables can have a significant impact on the whole system. Therefore, the second goal is to determine whether methodologies that are adequate for the assessment of complex interaction patterns, influences, interdependencies, and behavioural outcomes that are associated with the social context of the school, have been adopted over the past three decades.

The third goal is to explore potential methodologies in the study of educational leadership. These alternative methodologies are taken from more recent developments of research methodologies used in other fields. These fields, such as health, development of society, among others, have similarities with the study of educational leadership. The common link is the social contexts and the system’s influence involving the spectrum of interactions, change, and emergence. We will examine published empirical research and associated theories that look at influence, interdependencies, change, and emergence. Adopting these alternative methodologies will enable reframing educational leadership so it can move forward. Three questions guide the presentation of this paper:

What are the data sources and analytical methods adopted in educational leadership research?

What is the current landscape of schooling and how does it challenge current educational leadership research methodologies?

What are some possible alternative research methodologies and how can they complement current methodologies in educational leadership research?

This chapter proposes to reframe educational leadership studies in view of new knowledge and understanding of alternative research data and analytical methods. It is not the intent of the paper to suggest that current research methodologies are no longer valid. On the contrary, the corpus knowledge of current social science research methodologies practiced, taught, and learned through the past three decades cannot be dismissed lightly. Instead of proposing to reframe educational leadership studies, the main purpose of this paper is to explore and propose complementary research methodologies that will open up greater opportunities for research investigation. These opportunities are linked to the functions of adopting alternate analytical research tools.

7.2 What Are the Dominant Methodologies Adopted in Educational Leadership Research?

Educational leadership research adopts a spectrum of methods that conform to the characteristics of disciplined inquiry. Cronbach and Suppes ( 1969 ) defined disciplined inquiry as “conducted and reported in such a way that the argument can be painstakingly examined” (p. 15). What this means is that any data collected and interpreted through reasoning and arguments must be capable of withstanding careful scrutiny by another research member in the field.

This section looks at the disciplined inquiry methods adopted and implemented in the last thirty years that have contributed to the current body of knowledge on educational leadership and management. The pragmatic rationale to impose a time frame for the review is that instructional leadership was conceptualized in the 1980s, followed by transformational leadership and in recent years, distributed leadership. The purpose of this review is to identify, if possible, all quantitative and qualitative methods adopted. The next section provides a broad overview of the three educational leadership theories/models. This will anchor the discussion on alternate research methodologies that will reframe and expand the research on these theories/models.

7.2.1 Instructional, Transformational, and Distributed Leadership

Instructional leadership became popular during the early 1980s. There are two general concepts of instructional leadership – one is narrow while the other is broad (Sheppard, 1996 ). The narrow concept defines instructional leadership as actions that are directly related to teaching and learning, such as conducting classroom observations. This was the earlier conceptualization of instructional leadership in the 1980s, and it was normally applied within the context of small, poor urban primary schools (Hallinger, 2003 ; Meyer & Macmillan, 2001 ). The broad concept of instructional leadership includes all leadership activities that indirectly affect student learning, including school culture, and time-tabling procedures by impacting the quality of curriculum and instruction delivered to students. This conceptualization acknowledges that principals, as instructional leaders, have a positive impact on students’ learning, but that this influence is mediated (Goldring & Greenfield, 2002 ; Leithwood & Jantzi, 2000 ; Southworth, 2002 ). A comprehensive model of instructional leadership was developed by Hallinger and Murphy ( 1985 , 1986 ). This dominant model proposes three dimensions of the instructional leadership construct: defining the school’s mission, managing the instructional program, and promoting a positive school-learning climate. Hallinger and Heck ( 1996 ), in their comprehensive review of research on school leadership, concluded that instructional leadership was the most commonly researched. The authors’ focused review found that over 125 empirical studies employed this construct between 1980 and 2000 (Hallinger, 2003 ). In the last decade, instructional leadership has regained prominence and attention in part because of the lack of empirical studies in non-Western societies. This can also be inferred from the notion that leadership in curriculum and instruction still matters and remains the core business of schools.

Transformational leadership was introduced as a theory in the general leadership literature during the 1970s and 1980s (e.g. Bass, 1997 ; Howell & Avolio, 1993 ). Transformational leadership focuses on developing the organisation’s capacity and commitment to innovate (Leithwood & Duke, 1999 ). Correspondingly, transformational leadership is supposed to enable change to occur (Leithwood, Tomlinson, & Genge, 1996 ). Amongst the leadership models, transformational leadership is the one most explicitly linked to the implementation of change. It quickly gained popularity among educational leadership researchers during the 1990s in part because of reports of underperforming schools as a result of top-down policy driven changes in the 1980s. Sustained interest during the 1990s was also fuelled by the perception that the instructional leadership model is a directive model (Hallinger & Heck, 1996 ). In a pointed statement of the extent of instructional leadership research, Hallinger ( 2003 , p. 343) emphatically notes that “The days of the lone instructional leader are over. We no longer believe that one administrator can serve as the instructional leader for the entire school without the substantial participation of other educators.” From the beginning of the 2000s, a series of review studies comparing the effects of transformational leadership and instructional leadership, the ‘over-prescriptivity’ of findings, the limited methodologies adopted, and a lack of international research contributed to the waning interest in transformational leadership (Robinson et al., 2008 , Robinson, 2010 ).

Interest in distributed leadership took off at around 2000. Gronn ( 2002 ), and Spillane, Halverson, and Diamond ( 2004 ) are leading the current debate on distributed leadership as observed by Harris ( 2005 ). Gronn’s concept of distributed leadership is a “purely theoretical exploration” (p. 258) while Spillane’s and his various colleagues’ work is based on empirical studies that are still ongoing. When Gronn and Spillane first proposed their concepts of distributed leadership, what was revolutionary was a shift from focusing on the leadership actions of an individual as a sole agent to analyzing the ‘concertive’ or ‘conjoint’ actions of multiple individuals interacting and leading within a specific social and cultural context (Bennett, Wise, Woods, & Harvey, 2003 ; Gronn, 2002 , 2009 ; Spillane, 2005 ; Woods, 2004 ). In addition, Spillane, Diamond, and Jita ( 2003 ) explicitly relate their concept of distributed leadership to instructional improvement, which, therefore, catalyzes the interest among researchers to explore the constructs in school improvement and effectiveness. From 2000 to 2016, a focused search for empirical studies that employed the constructs of distributed leadership yielded over 97 studies.

7.2.2 Assessment of the Dominant Methodologies in Educational Leadership Research and Courses

The purpose of this review is to identify, if possible, all the quantitative and qualitative methods adopted. This review is based on a combined search for the three educational leadership theories in schools using the following search parameters:

Keywords in database search: “instructional leadership” OR “transformational leadership” OR “distributed leadership”

Limiters: Full Text; Scholarly (Peer-reviewed) Journals; Published Date: 1980–2016

Narrow by Methodology: quantitative study

Narrow by Methodology: qualitative study

Search modes: Find all search terms

Interface: EBSCOhost Research Databases

Database: Academic Search Premier; British Education Index; Education Source; ERIC

The search yielded over 672 empirical studies employing the constructs of instructional leadership, transformational leadership, and distributed leadership. As the purpose of the review is to identify all quantitative and qualitative methods adopted, only that information was extracted. The researchers carefully read the relevant sections of the 672 studies pertaining to methodologies and extracted that information. An overview of the results is given in Tables 7.1 and 7.2 .

The range of quantitative and qualitative research methodologies and analytical tools found in the review was categorized as follows:

Quantitative Analyses:

Univariate Analysis:

The analysis refers to a single variable represented by frequency distribution, mean and standard deviation.

Bivariate Analysis:

This type of analysis examines how two variables are related to each other, represented by ANOVA, Pearson product moment correlations, correlation and regression.

Multivariate Analysis:

These are statistical procedures that are used to reach conclusions about associations between two or more variables. Representations of inferential statistics include regression coefficients, MANOVA, MANCOVA, two-group comparison (t-test), factor analysis, path analysis, hierarchical linear modelling, and others.

Qualitative Analyses:

Content Analysis:

Content analysis is the systematic analysis of the text by adopting rules that can separate the text into units of analysis, such as assumptions, effects, enablers and barriers. The text is obtained through document search, artifacts, interviews, field notes, or observations. The transcribed data are converted into protocols followed by categories. Coding schemes are then applied to determine themes and their relations.

Hermeneutic Analysis:

With this type of analysis, researchers interpret the subjective meaning of a given text within its socio-historic context. Methods adopted extend beyond texts to encompass all forms of communication, verbal and non-verbal. An iterative analyses method between interpretation of text and holistic understanding of the context is adopted in order to develop a fuller understanding of the phenomenon.

Grounded-theory Analysis:

This is an inductive technique of interpreting recorded data about a social phenomenon. Data acquired through participant observation, in-depth interviews, focus groups, narratives of audio/video recordings, and documents are interpreted based on empirical data. A systematic coding technique involving open coding, axial coding, and selective coding is rigorously applied. These coding techniques aim to identify key ideas, categories, and causal relations among categories, finally arriving at a theoretical saturation where additional data and analyses do not yield any marginal change within the core categories.

On the one hand, these results show that a wide range of both quantitative and qualitative methodologies are applied and that the field is open to a lot of diversity in methodologies, but, on the other hand, the results also show that complexity methodology is missing completely.

One of the purposes of this paper is to identify current research methodologies that have been adopted for the past decades. The following review is to ascertain whether current research methodologies adopted are also reinforced and transmitted by the research courses offered by top universities. A search was conducted that specifically looked at graduate research courses taught in educational leadership and management. The following search parameters were used:

Identify the top 20 universities that offer graduate courses in educational leadership and management.

QS ranking of universities is chosen over Times ranking because QS ranking is sorted by subject: Education and searchable by educational leadership.

Representation of Western and Eastern universities in order to provide a representation of universities globally.

The findings are presented in Table 7.3 . This table is remarkably similar to Tables 7.1 and 7.2 but with more details of the topics in educational leadership research methodologies. The previously presented findings of the methodologies used in educational leadership research strongly suggest that the research methodologies currently adopted in educational leadership studies are reinforced by research courses taught at the top universities. Indeed, the transmission and application of research skills is a critical and essential component of graduate programmes. This transmission of knowledge and practice is strengthened by the enshrined supervisor-supervisee relationship where cognitive modelling takes place through discourse, reflection, guidance, and inquiry. The one-to-one supervision has the very powerful effect of instilling expectations, cultivating habits, and shaping practices that contribute to a competent researcher identity. It is noteworthy that the transmission-based form has emanated from and is continued in the paradigm of social science. Table 7.3 presents the research courses that are currently taught at the top 20 universities offering educational leadership research.

7.3 Limitations of the Dominant Methodologies in Educational Leadership Research and Courses

The range of methodologies and analytical tools reviewed above are disciplined inquiry methods in social science. Social sciences are the science of people or collections of people, such as groups, firms, societies, or economies, and their individual or collective behaviours; social sciences can be classified into different disciplines, such as psychology (the science of human behaviours), sociology (the science of social groups), and economics (the science of firms, markets, and economies). This section is not intended to wade into epistemological and ontological debates within the social sciences. It is also not possible to have an in-depth discussion on social science methodologies within the constraints of this paper. To highlight ongoing discussions about limitations of social science research is the focus of this paper.

Educational leadership is not a discipline by itself, but a field of study that involves events, factors, phenomena, organizations, topics, issues, people, and processes related to leadership in educational settings. This field of study adopts social science inquiry methods. The review of research methodologies, as depicted in Tables 7.1 and 7.2 , strongly suggests that educational leadership research subscribed to the functionalist paradigm (Bhattacherjee, 2012 ). The functionalist paradigm suggests that social order or patterns can be understood in terms of their functional components. Therefore, the logical steps will involve breaking down a problem into small components and studying one or more components in detail using objectivist techniques, such as surveys and experimental research. It also encompasses an in-depth investigation of the phenomenon in order to uncover themes, categories, and sub-categories.

Educational leadership studies, using quantitative methods, aim to minimize subjectivity. Hence, the constant advocacy of good sampling techniques and a large sample size in order to represent a population where the sample is reported by mean, standard deviation, and normal distribution, among others. Qualitative methods rest upon the assumption that there is no single reality for events, phenomena, and meaning in the social world. Adopting a disciplined analytical method based on dense contextualized data in order to arrive at an acceptable interpretation of complex social phenomena is advocated. The following section will discuss several common limitations of social science research.

7.3.1 Population, Sampling, and Normal Distributions

Based on the review, quantitative and qualitative methods of social science in educational leadership research can be inferred to subscribe to the goals of identifying and analyzing data that can inform about a population. Researchers aim to collect data that either maximize generalization to the population in the case of quantitative methods or provide explanation and interpretation of a phenomenon that represents a population in the case of qualitative methods. In most cases, definitive conclusions of a population are rarely possible in social sciences because data collection of an entire population is seldom achieved.

Therefore, researchers apply sampling procedures where the mean of the sampling distribution will approximate the mean of the true population distribution, which has come to be known as normal distribution. This concept has set the parameters as to how data has been collected and analyzed over many years. It has become widely accepted that most data ought to be near an average value, with a small number of values that are smaller, and the other extreme where values are larger. To calculate these values, the probability density function (PDF), or density of a continuous random variable, is used. It is a function that describes the relative likelihood for this random variable to take on a given value.

A simple example will help to explain this: If 20 school principals were randomly selected and arranged within a room according to their heights, one would most likely see a normal distribution: with a few principals who are the shortest on the left, the majority in the middle, and a few principals who are the tallest on the right. This has come to be known as the normal curve or probability density function.

Most quantitative research involves the use of statistical methods presuming independence among data points and Gaussian “normal” distributions (Andriani & McKelvey, 2007 ). The Gaussian distribution is characterized by its stable mean and finite variance (Torres-Carrasquillo et al., 2002 ). Suppose that in the example above the shortest principal is 1.6 m. Given the question, “What is the probability of a principal in the line being shorter than 1.5m?”, the answer would be ‘0’. From the total number of principals in the room, there is no probability to find someone who is shorter than 1.6 m. But if the question were, “What is the probability of a principal in the line being 1.7m?”, then the answer could be 0.2 (i.e. 10%, or 2 persons). Hence, this explains the finite variance, which is dependent upon the sample size. Normal distributions assume few values far from the mean and, therefore, the mean is representative of the population. Even largest deviations, which are exceptionally rare, are still only about a factor of two from the mean in either direction and are well-characterized by quoting a simple standard deviation (Clauset, Shalizi, & Newman, 2009 ). This property of the normal curve, in particular the notion that extreme ends of variance are less likely to occur, has significant implications as will be discussed.

Is the normal distribution the standard to determine acceptable findings in educational research? One possible answer is a study done by Micceri ( 1989 ). His investigation involved obtaining secondary data from 46 different test sources and 89 different populations, and that included psychometric and achievement/ability measures. He managed to obtain analyzed data from 440 researchers; he then submitted these secondary data to analysis and found that they were significantly non-normal at the alpha.01 significance level. In fact, his findings showed that tail weights, exponential-level asymmetry, severe digit preferences, multi-modalities, and modes external to the mean/median interval were evident. His conclusion was that the underlying tenets of normality-assuming statistics appear fallacious for the psychometric measures. Micceri ( 1989 , p. 16) added that “one must conclude that the robustness literature is at best indicative.”

In another well-cited article in the Review of Educational Research, Walberg, Strykowski, Rovai, and Hung ( 1984 , p. 87) state that “considerable evidence shows that positive-skew distributions characterize many objects and fundamental processes in biology, crime, economics, demography, geography, industry, information and library sciences, linguistics, psychology, sociology, and the production and utilization of knowledge.” Perhaps the most pointed statement made by Walberg et al., that “commonly reported univariate statistics such as means, standard deviations, and ranges – as well as bivariate and multivariate statistics […] and regression weights – are generally useless in revealing skewness” is worthy to note.

What are the implications and limitations of the normal distribution in the population? There are at least two limitations. First, reliance on normal distribution statistics puts a heavy burden on assumptions and procedures. The procedures of randomness and equilibrium have powerful influences on how theories are built and also determine how research questions are formulated. In other words, findings may be rejected that could otherwise be informative because they do not meet the normal distribution litmus. The explanation of the normal distribution suggests that any events or phenomena at both (extreme) ends of the normal curve are highly unlikely – consequently, we typically reject those findings. Research on real-world phenomena, e.g. social networks, banking networks, and world-wide web networks, has established that events in the tails are more likely to happen than under the assumption of a normal distribution (Mitzenmacher, 2004 ). Many real-world networks (world-wide web, social networks, professional networks, etc.) have what is known as long-tailed distribution instead of normal distribution.

Second, independent variables contributing to a normal distribution assume that the variables are static. The reality is that in education (and educational leadership) the variables are dynamic. This dynamic function comes from past and even future environmental and individual influences. An example is that of being fortunate to have initial advantages, such as enrolling in a university study (past influence), working with eminent researchers (preferential attachment), obtaining well-funded research projects, and having publication opportunities (environmental influence), combine multiplicatively over time and accumulate to produce a highly skewed number of publications. The distribution would not conform to the normal curve for researchers when past influence, preferential attachment, and environmental influences are taken into consideration. At the moment, the large majority of reviewed studies, using inferential statistics of mean and standard deviations, does not account for such dynamic influences upon the variables. Is there an alternative that could complement this limitation?

7.3.2 Linearity in a Predominantly Closed System

The dominant analytical tools adopted in educational leadership research involve relational and associational analyses of the effects of leadership actions and interventions in schools. The focus is on identifying variables, factors, and their associations in providing explanations of successful practices. The central concept of relations is based on the assumption of linearity. Linearity means two things: Proportionality between cause and effect, and superposition (Nicolis, Prigogine, & Nocolis, 1989 ). According to this principle, complex problems can be broken down into simpler problems, which can be solved individually. That is, the effects of interventions can be reconstructed by summing up the effects of the single causes acting on the single variable. This, then, allows establishing causality efficiently.

However, this assumption forces researchers to accept that systems are in equilibrium. The first implication is that the number of possible outcomes in a system is limited (because of the limited number of variables within a closed system). The second implication is that moments of instability, such as through an intervention from the school leader, are brief, whereas the duration of the stability of the final outcome is long. In that case, one can measure effects or establish relations, and accept its data value as a true indication of the cause of intervention. For this to be true, however, the many variables in the school (as a closed system) must be assumed to be independent. Other possibilities to this assumption are to have interdependence, mutual causality, and the occurrence of possible external influences in the larger system (e.g. political or economic change).

The goal of school leadership is to improve student achievement. Student achievement is demonstrable, even though there are considerable differences of opinion about how to define improvement in learning or achievement (Larsen-Freeman, 1997 ). This is because much research assumes that the classroom is a closed system with defined boundaries, variables, and predictable outcomes. This mechanistic linear view neglects students as active constructors of meaning with diverse views, needs, and goals (Doll Jr, 1989 ). It is debatable to draw the association directly that teachers’ pedagogy results in learning. Luo, Hogan, Yeung, Sheng, and Aye ( 2014 ) found that Singapore students attributed their academic success mainly to internal regulations (effort, interest, and study skills), followed by teachers’ help, teachers’ ability, parents’ help, and tuition classes. While the study appears to support linearity and attribute students’ academic success to identified variables, there is still much less certainty about other aspects, such as the interaction effects among the variables. The use of generalized linearity cannot account for the interactions among students – how they motivate each other, how they compete, and how they derive the drive to perform. Researchers studying student achievement tend to seek to reduce and consolidate variables in order to discover order while denying irregularity.

Due to its simplicity, linearity became almost universally adopted as the true assumption along with its corresponding measures in educational leadership research. School improvement, student learning, staff capacity, and efficacy are much more complex than directly assigned proportionality between factors and outcomes, and identifying superposition. Cziko ( 1989 , p. 17) asserted that “complex human behaviour of the type that interests educational researchers is by its nature unpredictable if not indeterminate, a view that raises serious questions about the validity of quantitative, experimental, positivist approach to educational research.” In general, school improvement ought to include a notion of and methodology for describing non-linear cognitive systems or processes and to accept that research questions cannot be simplified to find answers from regression models alone, particularly research questions that involve non-specified outcome variables. For instance, school success, in addition to internal variables and factors, simultaneously includes influence by changes in government policies and conflicting demands of multiple stakeholders (e.g. economic and society-related stakeholders). Relying only on the linearity within a closed system will limit any understanding of such interdependencies and mutual influences. Therefore, a holistic and more complete understanding of social phenomena, such as why some school systems in some countries are more successful than others, requires an appreciation and application of research methods that include the elements of open and closed systems. The alternative to linearity – non-linearity, emergence, and self-organization – as an alternate view of reality shall be discussed in the fourth part of this chapter.

7.3.3 Explanatory, Explorative, and Descriptive Research

One of the research aims in social science is the understanding of subjectively meaningful experiences. The school of thought that stresses the importance of interpretation and observation in understanding the social situation in schools is also known as ‘interpretivism.’ This is an integral part of qualitative research methodologies and analytical tools adopted in educational leadership research. The interrelatedness of different aspects of staff members’ work (teaching, professional development), interactions with students (learning, guidance, etc.), cultural factors, and others, form a very important focus of qualitative research. Qualitative research practice has reflected this in the use of explanatory, explorative, and descriptive methods, which attempt to provide a holistic understanding of research participants’ views and actions in the context of their lives overall.

Ritchie, Lewis, Nicholls, and Ormston ( 2013 ) provide clear explanations for the following research practices: Exploratory research is undertaken to explore an issue or a topic. It is particularly useful in helping to identify a problem, clarify the nature of a problem or define the issues involved. It can be used to develop propositions and hypotheses for further research, to look for new insights or to reach a greater understanding of an issue. For example, one might conduct exploratory research to understand how staff members react to new curriculum plans or ideas for developing holistic achievement, or what teachers mean when they talk about ‘constructivism,’ or to help define what is meant by the term ‘white space.’

A significant number of qualitative studies reviewed in this paper are about description as well as exploration – finding the answers to the Who? What? Where? When? How? and How many? questions. While exploratory research can provide description, the purpose of descriptive research is to answer more clearly defined research questions. Descriptive research aims to provide a perspective for social phenomena or sets of experiences.

Explanatory research addresses the Why questions: Why do staff members value empowerment? Why do some staff members perceive the school climate negatively and others do not? Why do some students have a high self-motivation and others do not? What might explain this? Explanatory, in particular qualitative research assists in answering these types of questions, which allows ruling out rival explanations, guidance to come to valid conclusions, and developing causal explanations.

An obvious limitation of explanatory, explorative, and descriptive educational leadership research is that this is done after an intervention; another limitation constitutes the mere focus on outcomes. If research tapped into this process before interventions were implemented, then two reasonable questions would be:

Will an intended school vision or policy have the desired positive reception among staff members?

How can one predict the kind of reception or perception staff members might have?

The answers would be useful for school leaders in order to initiate intervention measures before serious damage occurs. It would be most useful to be able to extrapolate those answers to the larger system, where policy makers are interested in predicting likely outcomes of the policy prior to its implementation. An example of this kind of research is the development of models known as simulations. Computer simulation is known as the third disciplined scientific methodology. This concept will be discussed in the latter section on alternative methodologies.

A summary of the limitations of current methodologies in educational leadership is concisely captured by Leithwood and Jantzi ( 1999 , p. 471): “Finally, even the most sophisticated quantitative designs used in current leadership effects research treat leadership as exogenous variable influencing students, sometimes directly, but mostly indirectly, through school conditions, moderated by student background characteristics. The goal of such research usually is to validate a specific form of leadership by demonstrating significant effects on the school organization and on students. The logic of such designs assumes that influence flows in one direction – from the leader to the student, however tortuous the path might be. But the present study hints at a far more complex set of interactions between leadership, school conditions, and family educational culture in the production of student outcomes.”

7.4 The Current Landscape of Schooling

7.4.1 complexity of schools: systems and structures.

Murphy ( 2015 ) examined the evolution of education from the industrial era in the USA (1890–1920) to the post-industrial era of the 1980s. He concluded that post-industrial school organizations have fundamentally shifted in roles, relationships, and responsibilities. The shift is seen in the blurring of distinctions between administrators and teachers; general (expanded) roles instead of specialization, where specialization is no longer held in high regard, as compared to the industrial era, with greater flexibility and adaptability. In terms of structures, the traditional hierarchical organizational structures are giving way to structures that are flatter.

This shift in roles, relationships, and responsibilities has (also) contributed to the increasing complexity of schools. The direct and indirect involvement between and among a growing circle of stakeholders within the school and between government, employers, and communities clearly support the view that schooling is no longer seen as a closed system. It is both a closed and open system (Darling-Hammond, 2010 ; Hargreaves & Shirley, 2009 ; Leithwood & Day, 2007 ). Leithwood and Day ( 2007 ) state that “Schools are dynamic organizations, and change in ways that cannot be predicted,” as they reviewed leadership studies from eight different countries. Open systems are “a system in exchange of a matter with its environment” (Von Bertalanffy, 1968 , p. 141). Schools as an open system are therefore seen as part of a much larger network rather than an independent, self-standing entity.

Thus, to understand the processes still existing within the schools, it is critical to study the interrelations between those entities and their connections to the whole system. The interrelationships among stakeholders are non-linear and discontinuous, so even small changes in variables can have a significant impact on the whole system. This notion of small change leading to global change is reflected in the example of the current ‘world-class education system’ movement. From countries as diverse as the United Arab Emirates, Brazil, Hong Kong, Singapore, Vietnam, Australia, and the United States of America, a common theme found in education reform documents is the term “world-class education.” This term has become widely associated with comparative results on international tests, such as Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which purports to measure certain aspects of educational quality. Indeed, the term is frequently used by countries that have attained high scores in these international tests as a strong indicator of being world-class. This seemingly small aspect of change (i.e. the comparing of achievements in Mathematics and Science) has impacted developing and developed nations in reforming their education system and in calling their ongoing education reforms as moving towards a ‘world-class education system.’

Thus, interrelationships in an open system require sophisticated analyses of their systemic nature. A reductionist and linear sequential relationship investigation would not be sufficient in order to bring about further change. To remain of value with the current trends, educational leadership researchers, who adopt complexity methodology, would help practitioners shaping the future by creating an environment of valid knowledge.

7.4.2 Shared and Distributed Leadership

The idea of distributed leadership connects well with the trend towards greater decentralization (since the 1980s) and school autonomy through which school leaders are expected to play a greater role in leadership beyond the school borders and requires them to make budgetary decisions, foster professional capacity development, and play a role in the design of school buildings, and many more aspects (Glatter & Kydd, 2003 ; Lee, Hallinger, & Walker, 2012 ; Nguyen, Ng, & Yap, 2017 ; Spillane, Halverson, & Diamond, 2001 ).

A core function of leadership – distributed leadership included – is decision-making. The most popular discussion of decision-making of the twenty-first century emanates from the concept of decentralization. Decentralization includes delegating responsibilities, practice of distributed leadership, and practice of distributed or shared instructional leadership (Lee et al., 2012 ; Nguyen et al., 2017 ; Spillane et al., 2001 ).

Glatter and Kydd ( 2003 ) identified two models of decentralization, which have important implications for school leaders, namely local empowerment and school empowerment. In local empowerment, the transfer of responsibilities takes place from the state to the districts, including schools with reciprocal rights and obligations. Therefore, school leaders are expected to play a greater role in leadership beyond school borders. Within the context of school empowerment or autonomy, decision-making by the school has been a consistent movement since the 1980s. The increase in autonomy required the school leaders to make budgetary changes, promote professional capacity development, rethink the design of school buildings, and consider many more aspects.

How might national and state policy frameworks (including curriculum and assessment, school quality and improvement) successfully engage and interact with key activities and characteristics of the school (including learning focus, structure, culture, and decision-making capacity)? What considerations must be taken when formulating policies of curriculum and implementation of policies within the classroom (class size, teaching approaches, and learning resources)? How does one optimize the capacity and work of school leaders to influence and promote effective learning? How might one be informed of the processes of influence beyond relying on interpretive and explanatory qualitative studies? Indeed, any attempt to design and carry out a comprehensive analysis of the ways in which leaders influence and promote successful outcomes through their decision-making will require specific methods and procedures beyond the traditional research methods (Leithwood & Levin, 2005 ). In particular, distributed leadership research stands to gain the most if relevant research methodologies were adopted that could be informative of the workings/actions of school leadership.

7.5 What Are the Alternatives to Current Social Science Methodologies for Educational Leadership?

As stated earlier, it is important to ensure that any alternative research methodologies proposed must adhere to the characteristic of disciplined inquiry. To further expand on this characteristic, Cronbach and Suppes stated that “Disciplined inquiry does not necessarily follow well-established, formal procedures. Some of the most excellent inquiry is free-ranging and speculative […] trying what might seem to be a bizarre combination of ideas and procedures…” (Cronbach & Suppes, 1969 , p. 16).

Drawing from the statement by Cronbach and Suppes, there are two other important points about disciplined inquiry that must be addressed here. Disciplined inquiry is not solely focussed on establishing facts. The methods of observation and inquiry are critical in defining which selection of facts of a phenomenon are found. Establishing facts can be done through a selection of observations and/or data collection methods. This point is not meant to raise the philosophical argument of positivism and post-positivism although it may be implied. Rather, from a pragmatic perspective, and to adhere to the characteristic of disciplined inquiry, one should be open to different types of observations and data collection methodologies, and thus different types of facts, as long as the definition of disciplined inquiry is adhered to. To further support this view, it must be understood that the field of educational leadership is not a discipline by itself. As in any field of study, one should not be limited to a single discipline to dictate and direct the focus and forms of studies. Instead, procedures and perspectives of different disciplines, such as biology, chemistry, economics, geography, politics, anthropology, sociology, and others might bear on the research questions that can be investigated.

7.5.1 Brief Introduction to Complexity Science from an Educational Leadership Perspective

Complexity science appeared in the twentieth century in response to criticism of the inadequacy of the reductionist analytical thinking model in helping to understand systems and the intricacies of organizations. Complexity science does not refer to a single discipline; like in social science, a family of disciplines (psychology, sociology, economics, etc.) adopt methodologies to study society-related phenomena. Complexity science includes the disciplines of non-linear dynamical systems, networks, synergetics, and complex adaptive systems, and others.

The cornerstone concept of complexity science is the complex system. Complex systems have distinctive characteristics of self-organization, adaptive ability, emergent properties, non-linear interactions, and dynamic and network-like structures (Bar-Yam, 2003 ; Capra, 1996 ; Cilliers, 2001 ). By looking at the complex system of an organization, leadership should, consequently, be viewed in a different light. A complex system is a ‘functional whole,’ consisting of interdependent and variable parts. In other words, unlike a conventional system (e.g. an aircraft), the parts need not have fixed relationships, fixed behaviours, or fixed quantities. Thus, their individual functions may also be undefined in traditional terms. Despite the apparent tenuousness of this concept, these systems form the majority of our world, and include living organisms and social systems, along with many inorganic natural systems (e.g. rivers). The following is a brief introduction of key concepts of complexity science. These concepts are also the methodological assumptions for complexity science.

7.5.2 Emergence

Emergence is a key concept in understanding how different levels are linked in a system. In the case of leadership, it is about how influence happens at the individual, structural, and system levels. These different levels exist simultaneously, and one is not necessarily more important than the other, rather they are recognized as co-existing and linked.

Each level has different patterns and can be subjected to different kinds of theorization. Patterns at ‘higher’ levels can emerge in ways that are hard to predict at the ‘lower’ levels. The challenge (long-acknowledged in leadership research) is to understand how different levels interact and affect school outcome or school improvement. This question of the nature of ‘emergence’ has been framed in a variety of ways, including those of “macro-micro linkage,” “individual and society,” the “problem of order,” and “structure, action and structuration” (Giddens, 1984 ). In this paper, Giddens’ explanation of emergence as the relationship between the different levels through the “structure and agency” is adopted.

Giddens stated that the term “structure” referred generally to “rules and resources.” These properties make it possible for social practices to exist across time and space and that lends them ‘systemic’ form (Giddens, 1984 , p. 17). Giddens referred to agents as groups or individuals who draw upon these structures to perform social actions through embedded memory, called memory traces. Memory traces are, thus, the vehicle by which social actions are carried out. Structure is also, however, the result of these social practices.

7.5.3 Non-linearity

Non-linearity refers to leadership effects or outcomes that are more complicated than being assigned to a single source or single chain of events. Influence and outcome are considered linear if one can attribute cause and effect. Non-linearity in leadership, however, means that the outcome is not proportional to the input and that the outcome does not conform to the principle of additivity, i.e. it may involve synergistic reactions, in which the whole is not equal to the sum of its parts.

One way to understand non-linearity is about how small events lead to large scale changes in systems. Within the natural sciences, the example often cited (or imagined) is that of a small disturbance in the atmosphere in one location, perhaps as small as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, tipping the balance of other systems, leading ultimately to a storm on the other side of the globe (Capra, 1997 ).

7.5.4 Self-Organization

Self-organization happens naturally as a result of non-linear interactions among staff members in the school (Fontana & Ballati, 1999 ). As the word describes, there is no central authority guiding and imposing the interactions. Staff members adapt to changing goals and situations by adopting communication patterns that are not centrally controlled by an authority. In the process of working towards a goal (e.g. solving a leadership problem), self-organizing staff members tend to exhibit creativity and novelty as they have to quickly adapt and to find ways and means to solve the problem and achieve the goal.

This particular phenomenon is best observed in distributed leadership (Ng & Ho, 2012 ; Yuen, Chen, & Ng, 2015 ). As a result of interactions among members, the emergence of new patterns in conversation happens. This is an important aspect of self-organization. When there are no new patterns in conversations, there are no new ideas and no novel ways to solve problems. It must be noted that new patterns of conversation depend upon the responsiveness of its members towards each other and their awareness of each other’s ideas and responses. As a result of the behaviour of interacting members, learning and adaptation, i.e. novel ways of solving problems emerge.

As stated earlier, complexity science is interdisciplinary and as such, there are multiple methods and ways to study complexity phenomena. It is nearly impossible to delve into these methodologies in a meaningful manner within the scope of one paper.

The intention with this paper is to propose alternative social science methodologies and analytical tools to perform educational leadership research. The following section will highlight one of the methods used in complexity science research that provides an alternative to the limitations identified in current research methodologies in educational leadership research.

7.6 Social Network Analysis as an Alternative to Normal Distribution and Linearity

Social Network Analysis (Scott, 2011 ; Wasserman & Faust, 1994 ) focuses on relational structures that characterize a network of people. These relational structures are represented by graphs of individuals and their social relations, and indices of structure, which analyze the network of social relationships on the basis of characteristics such as neighbourhood, density, centrality, cohesion, and others. The Social Network Analysis-method has been used to investigate educational issues, such as teacher professional networks (Baker-Doyle & Yoon, 2011 ; Penuel, Riel, Krause, & Frank, 2009 ), the spread of educational innovations (Frank, Zhao, & Borman, 2004 ), and peer influences on youth behaviour (Ennett et al., 2006 ). Table 7.4 provides examples of the types of data collected, and the analytical methods and analytical tools used in social network analysis.

In network analysis, indicators of centrality identify the most important vertices within a graph. Two separate measures of degree centrality, namely in-degree and out-degree, are used. In-degree is a count of the number of ties directed to the node (agent/individual) and out-degree is the number of ties that the node (agent/individual) directs to others. When ties are associated to positive aspects, such as friendship or collaboration, in-degree is often interpreted as a form of popularity and out-degree as a form of gregariousness.

For example, the study of Bird and colleagues (Bird, Gourley, Devanbu, Gertz, & Swaminathan, 2006 ) introduces social network analysis and the evidence of long-tailed distribution, which is a distinctive digression from the traditional social science study and the normal distribution associated with it. The evidence from social network measures in this research suggests that “developers who actually commit changes, play much more significant roles in the e-mail community than non-developers” (Bird et al., 2006 , p. 142). What this conclusion alludes to is that knowledgeable and active developers who demonstrate their ability by actively responding and making changes (out-degree) based on feedback are more often contacted by e-mail queries from other users.

7.6.1 How Does Social Network Analysis Contribute to Educational Leadership Research?

The usefulness of social network analysis is reflected in a study (co-conducted by the author) on instructional leadership practices in primary schools in a centralized system where hierarchical structures are in place (Nguyen et al., 2017 ). It is noteworthy that the hierarchical structure’s inherent reliance on a ‘supreme leader’ is greatly mitigated by the emergence of heterarchical elements. In brief, hierarchical structures, on the one hand, are vertical top-down control and reporting structures. Heterarchical structures, on the other hand, are horizontal. The findings revealed that at the teachers’ and other key personnel’s horizontal levels of hierarchy, spontaneous interactions and collaborations take place within a group and amongst groups of teachers. Through these horizontal professional interactions, individuals exert reciprocal influences on one another, with the minimal effects of authority power. In this structure, distributed instructional leadership appears to be deliberately practiced. Key personnel and teachers work in collaborative teams and are supported by organizational structures, initiated by the principals. This is where various instructional improvement programmes and strategies are initiated, implemented, and led by staff members. This would be highly impossible, if the principal practices were heavily based on hierarchical instructional leadership.

This study implies that decision-making on instructional improvement programmes is rigorously and actively practiced by teachers at the heterarchical level. Decision-making involves getting support for resources and approval from authorities over the teachers. In an organizational hierarchical structure, it would be the authority immediately above the teachers - the Head of Department, followed by the Vice Principal, and finally the Principal. Typically, such a reporting and resource seeking structure would be ineffective in creating instructional improvement programmes. If one was to redo the study and adopt social network analysis measures, how would the findings be presented? The figures below are hypothetically generated to provide a possible way to interpret hierarchical and heterarchical structures: Fig. 7.1 shows a social network representation, which provides an alternative way to represent hierarchy. The central (purple dot) represents the Principal, while the connected red dots to the Principal are the Head of Departments. The Head of Departments then oversees Subject Heads and finally teachers. Implying from our study, where heterarchical elements are exhibited, social network representation will most plausibly provide the means to represent the elements in Fig. 7.1 .

Expected and actual reporting and decision-making pathways in managing teaching and learning

Note: In B, T1 = perceived authority for immediate action (e.g. allocation of resources, ability to act); T2 = perceived trust; T3 = pilot curriculum project

What is immediately evident, is that the representation provides a more realistic way to look at social interactions involving decision-making. The connected dots among teachers could reveal who they interact most with. In addition, what would be most revealing is the emergence of how teachers in hybrid hierarchical and heterarchical structures make decisions. Specifically, the emergence of by-passing the constraints of a typical top-down hierarchical structure by directly getting support from centrality – the principal, who controls and provides resources and who also approves final decisions.

In summary, the discussion on one of the complexity science methodologies/social network analysis presents opportunities to reframe educational leadership research. It is now possible to ask research questions that are not bound by the constraints of current social science methodologies. Here are a number of questions using Social Network Analysis alone:

What is the local (indigenous) knowledge base of instructional leadership and how does it emerge?

How do different level leaders (Ministry of Education, Superintendents, Principals, etc.) shape the perception of curriculum policies in schools? (And – for specific local understanding – who are the influential personnel impacting curriculum and policy implementation?)

Examination of ties among school departments that affect school improvement: What are the implications for long-term strategy processes for school improvement in light of the complex and adaptive nature of departments?

What does engagement in decision-making look like?

How do aspects of relations within the network: structural (pattern of interaction, face-to-face interaction), affective (benevolence and trust), and cognitive (mutual knowledge about each other’s skills and knowledge, and shared systems of meaning) affect professional development and learning?

Will an intended school vision/policy enjoy the desired positive reception among staff members?

7.7 Conclusion

This chapter contains the review that social science methodologies and analytical tools have been consistently and almost universally adopted in educational leadership research for the last three decades. This paper also highlights a number of limitations of current social science methodologies. The alternative complexity science research methodologies proposed are not merely alternative or novel ways of examining the problems or issues encountered. What is more valuable is that these alternative methodologies bring with them their contrasting disciplinary roots and their corresponding (new) questions. The interest in the effects of educational leadership on school improvement can now be investigated by asking different research questions. One could, indeed, go deeper, wide-angle or zoom-in, and even make predictions by revisiting the basic question of “What do we wish to know about school improvement that we do not yet know enough about?”

By being open to alternative methodologies, one has nothing to lose but everything to gain in the scholastic pursuit of knowledge in the field of educational leadership and management. Researchers must avoid being educational leadership researchers who see the world merely from the perspectives that they have lived in; they should also avoid accepting these perspectives as the only perspectives without questions. The choice of research method or combination of methods affects the type of research questions asked (although, in practice, the questions are also often shaped by the researchers’ training and area of expertise). Ideally, one should not be constrained by methods before asking research questions. Research questions are the primary drivers of the quest for knowledge. This is the basis from which the most relevant methodologies are found that can answer research questions and provide researchers with the findings that can contribute to theory formation, knowledge building, and translation into practice. The author, therefore, proposes the following implications for practice and for research:

Introduce complexity science (and also other disciplines) as additional graduate research courses. One can still tap on the transmission-form of knowledge transfer and supervisor-supervisee platform.

Partner with established experts in the discipline of complexity science to leverage and speed up transfer of learning and research skills among educational leadership professors.

Engage in epistemological and ontological discussions (including generalizability of findings) on complexity theory – to deepen our understanding of the advantages and limitations of complexity science disciplined inquiries.

Expand educational leadership journals to accept findings and research that do not necessarily conform to social science methodologies alone.

Finally, reframing educational leadership research is an imperative in the light of diminishing researchable aspects due to the limitations of current methodologies. I, the author, want to reiterate that I do not advocate replacing existing social science methodologies. I acknowledge that social methodologies are still essential and vital. The full spectrum of social science research methodologies is needed to continue contributing to theory development in educational leadership and management. However, one also needs alternatives and complementary approaches to social science, such as complexity science methodologies for both theory development and theory building. The important thing to remember is that the questions come first and the methods follow.

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NG, D. (2021). Reframing Educational Leadership Research in the Twenty-First Century. In: Oude Groote Beverborg, A., Feldhoff, T., Maag Merki, K., Radisch, F. (eds) Concept and Design Developments in School Improvement Research. Accountability and Educational Improvement. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69345-9_7

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School leadership

Strengthening school leadership to improve teaching and learning is one of the strategies put forward to achieve target 4.c of the Education 2030 Agenda, which addresses the need to increase the supply of qualified teachers (UNESCO, 2016; United Nations, 2015). Studies have shown that school leadership has the second-largest in-school impact on student learning outcomes, behind only classroom teaching (UNESCO, 2018; VVOB, 2018). Through a managerial lens, school leaders can also help achieve target 4.a – provide safe, non-violent, inclusive, and equitable learning environments. In addition, by establishing a clear vision and promoting a positive culture, they can propel their schools to achieve targets 4.1 (equitable and quality education for all) and 4.5 (eliminate gender disparities and allow equal access to education for all vulnerable populations).

What we know

School leadership aims to get the best out of teachers and students. It can fall under either transformational or instructional/pedagogical leadership (Day and Sammons, 2014; UNESCO, 2018). Transformational leadership pertains to big-picture vision and structural reorganization, while instructional leadership refers to establishing the importance of teaching and learning to improve outcomes (Day and Sammons, 2014; OECD, 2016). School leadership roles include responsibilities that encompass both leadership (such as goal-setting or teacher evaluation) and management duties (resource management, teacher deployment) (UNESCO, 2018; Vaillant, 2015). Those in management roles establish day-to-day organization in a school while also providing control and oversight to teachers and students (Day and Sammons, 2014; UNESCO, 2018). While principals take on many of these tasks, school leadership can also include senior teachers, community members, other school administrators, and government officials (Spillane, Paquin Morel, and Al-Fadala, 2019; UNESCO, 2019b). School leaders also play a key role in developing community and family participation within the school (UNICEF, 2009).

School leaders establish the culture and organization necessary for schools to provide quality teaching and therefore have an indirect, but important, effect on student learning (OECD, 2016; UNESCO, 2018; World Bank, 2018). Studies have found that school leaders who provide better management services have a positive correlation to student outcomes (Bloom et al., 2014; Leaver, Lemos, and Scur, 2019). Other data has shown that principals that provide more instructional leadership increase teacher collaboration and sense of purpose (OECD, 2016). By providing effective guidance, training, and working conditions to teachers, school leaders and managers create the best possible environment for learning (Jensen, Downing, and Clark, 2017; UNESCO, 2019a). 

School leaders may have very different amounts of power and authority based on the governance structure in a country (OECD, 2016). There are large variances globally in the extent of decentralization that has occurred within education systems, resulting in the development of different leadership methods (Vaillant, 2015). Some countries have empowered schools and local school leadership, running on a system of school-based management (Garcia Moreno, Gertler, and Patrinos, 2019; Yamauchi, 2014). These systems, with independent budgets and staffing decisions, allow greater autonomy for school leaders (Garcia Moreno, Gertler, and Patrinos, 2019; Vaillant, 2015). Other countries have more centralized systems in which school leaders directly follow guidance from ministries of education (UNESCO, 2019a; Vaillant, 2015).

Lack of established qualifications for school leaders. Many countries lack formalized policy guidance on the requirements to become a principal or head teacher (Tournier et al., 2019; UNESCO, 2019b). In these cases, school leadership positions often go to senior teachers who may lack training or preparation for these roles (Education Commission, 2019; UNESCO, 2019b). Some countries appoint school leaders as political favours or with little transparency in the selection process (Tournier et al., 2019). Such issues can lead to the appointment of inexperienced and untrained leaders, which seriously hampers the effectiveness of schools and can have a negative impact on student learning.    Lack of incentive to become a school leader.  School leadership is a demanding profession, especially in contexts where resources are limited. The responsibilities transferred to schools under decentralization have considerably increased the activity portfolio of the school head. He or she must be able to manage the human, material, and financial resources of the school, to plan and manage the school improvement plan, but also to bring together actors within and around the school through the development of partnerships (Vaillant, 2015). Principals and other school leaders tend to work longer hours and have more responsibilities than teachers, but often receive little extra pay or other tangible incentives (OECD, 2020; Tournier et al., 2019; UNESCO, 2018). In many countries, a school leadership role represents a final position for senior teachers and offers little career mobility (OECD, 2019; Tournier et al., 2019). These factors can dissuade highly motivated teachers or other quality candidates from seeking school leadership positions.

School leaders can become full-time managers.  While instructional and pedagogical training is a key aspect of the job, many countries still use principals as simple administrative managers. A large part of their job is accountability reporting, which adds to the pressure of the work (Education Commission, 2019; UNESCO, 2018). School leaders in centralized systems can be submerged with top-down tasking or seeking approval from local or national authorities (UNESCO, 2019a). This lack of instructional leadership can lead to less teacher innovation and collaboration, and potentially affect student learning outcomes (Day and Sammons, 2014).

Lack of data on school leadership.  There is a lack of basic data about school leadership, such as qualifications or turnover. There remains a lack of integrated and comparative research in terms of effective school leadership policies and practices globally (Spillane, Paquin Morel, and Al-Fadala, 2019; UNESCO, 2018). This proves especially true in low- and middle-income countries, as much research focuses on high-performing systems and high-income countries (Day and Sammons, 2014; Jensen, Downing, and Clark, 2017; OECD, 2016, 2020). This dearth of research stems from a lack of both established policies and data collection, with much of the available information self-reported in documents such as the survey accompanying the Programme for International Student Assessment test (Leaver, Lemos, and Scur, 2019; UNESCO, 2018). All of these issues make developing effective, evidence-based strategies for school leadership extremely difficult in low-income countries.

Equity and inclusion

School leaders are vital to promoting equity.  School leaders drive the culture and focus of schools, and can be instrumental in promoting school equality and equity (UNESCO, 2017). They have an enormous impact on how vulnerable student populations receive instruction (Spillane, Paquin Morel, and Al-Fadala, 2019; UNESCO, 2018). By properly selecting and training teachers and instilling an equitable environment, school leaders can greatly enhance vulnerable students’ learning outcomes, especially in disadvantaged schools (UNESCO, 2017; Vaillant, 2015; VVOB, 2019). However, challenges including poor training or heavy administrative burdens can hinder this.

Leadership demographics.  Globally, the proportion of men in school leadership and management positions is higher than within the general teaching force (GEM Report Team, 2018; OECD, 2020; UNESCO, 2018). When women do attain leadership positions, these tend to be in primary or smaller schools rather than larger secondary or tertiary institutions (UNESCO, 2018, 2019b). Due to the ability of female principals and leaders to help encourage girls to stay in school, this lack of female leadership can have detrimental effects on learning equity (UNESCO, 2019b).

Policy and planning

Develop national standards for school leadership.  To better develop expectations for school leaders, policy-makers can establish codified standards, expectations, and recruitment strategies (Day and Sammons, 2014; OECD, 2020; UNESCO, 2018, 2019a). High-performing systems tend to integrate leadership standards and recruitment into their overall vision and goals for improving schools and learning outcomes (Jensen, Downing, and Clark, 2017). By developing transparent recruitment processes that seek candidates with the required skill sets, systems can set school leaders up for success (OECD, 2020; UNESCO, 2019b). Such measures help establish school leaders as an important part of the education system instead of merely viewing school leadership as a routine managerial task.

Develop a leadership career path.  To attract and retain the best leaders, principal and other leadership positions should not simply be coronations for senior teachers at the end of long careers. Instead, policies should establish leadership or administrative career paths with a clear progression that is separate from classroom teachers. This can incentivize performance and motivate ambitious leaders (Tournier et al., 2019). To better promote professional development practices and incentivize professional growth, such training can be linked to certifications or career milestones (UNESCO, 2019a). Research from the United States on the development of systematic processes for the strategic management of school leaders at district level points to school improvement and improved scores in mathematics and reading (Gates et al., 2019).

Provide training and professional development opportunities.  School leaders need proper initial training and continuous professional development to succeed (OECD, 2020; UNESCO, 2018, 2019a). As with in-service teacher training, continued training is key for principals and other school leaders (OECD, 2016; UNESCO, 2018; VVOB, 2019). Such training should promote leadership techniques, pedagogical and instructional guidance, and the vision and overall goals of the school system (Jensen, Downing, and Clark, 2017; Schleicher, 2012; UNESCO, 2019a, 2019b). Research has found that principals participating in instructional leadership training are then more engaged with teachers at their schools (OECD, 2016; VVOB, 2020). This type of training and development is especially vital as more systems move towards decentralization, and the required responsibilities of school leaders change and expand. 

Investigate the potential for distributed leadership.  Research shows that when leadership is not based on a single individual, the potential for improvement and innovation at the school level is increased. Such distributed leadership allows for delegating tasks among the different school actors and alleviates the workload of the school head. It also helps to involve teachers more actively in the management and functioning of the school, and to diversify their career opportunities (Breakspear et al., 2017).

Promote mentoring and relationship-building between school leaders and teachers.  School leaders play an important role in mentoring, which is key to improving teacher motivation, especially for new teachers (Tournier et al., 2019). While standards and training goals for school leaders remain context specific, policies should encourage all school leaders to establish and build relationships with their teachers (OECD, 2020). This comes not only through improving pedagogical techniques but also through seeking teacher input in decision-making, understanding their needs, and building trust (Day and Sammons, 2014; Tournier et al., 2019; UNESCO, 2018). Such actions can help in the day-to-day administration of schools, but they can also increase teacher motivation, collaboration, and sense of purpose (OECD, 2016; Tournier et al., 2019). School leaders (and schools) also benefit from building relationships outside of the school community and being part of networks, clusters, and professional learning communities (VVOB, 2018).

Plans and policies

• Rwanda: Teacher development and management policy (2007)
• Cook Islands: Governance, planning, and management (2016)
• UNESCO-IIEP; International Academy of Education. Recruitment, retention and development of school principals (2005)
• VVOB. CPD diploma courses for school and sector leaders ( Part 1   Part 2   Part 3 ) (2019)

Bloom, N.; Lemos, R.; Sadun, R.; van Reenen, J. 2014. Does management matter in schools . Working paper 20667. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.

Breakspear, S.; Peterson, A.; Alfadala, A.; Khair, M. S. B. M. 2017. Developing agile leaders of learning: School leadership policy for dynamic times . Qatar: World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE).

Day, C.; Sammons, P. 2014. Successful school leadership . Reading: Education Development Trust.

Education Commission. 2019. Transforming the education workforce: Learning teams for a learning generation . New York: The Education Commission.

Garcia Moreno, V. A.; Gertler, P. J.; Patrinos, H. A. 2019. School-based management and learning outcomes: Experimental evidence from Colima, Mexico . Policy Research working paper WPS 8874. Washington, DC: World Bank Group.

Gates, S. M.; Baird, M. D.; Master, B. K.; Chavez-Herrerias, E. R. 2019. Principal pipelines: A feasible, affordable, and effective way for districts to improve schools . Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation.

Global Education Monitoring Report Team. 2018. Global education monitoring report gender review 2018: Meeting our commitments to gender equality in education . Paris: UNESCO.

Jensen, B.; Downing, P.; Clark, A. 2017. Preparing to lead: Lessons in principal development from high-performing education systems . Washington, DC: National Center on Education and the Economy.

Leaver, C.; Lemos, R.; Scur, D. 2019. Measuring and explaining management in schools: New approaches using public data . Policy Research working paper WPS 9053. Washington, DC: World Bank Group.

OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). 2016. School leadership for learning: Insights from TALIS 2013 . Paris: OECD.

––––. 2019. Working and learning together: Rethinking human resource policies for schools . OECD Reviews of School Resources. Paris: OECD.

––––. 2020. TALIS 2018 results (Volume II): Teachers and school leaders as valued professionals . Paris: OECD. 

Schleicher, A. 2012. Preparing teachers and developing school leaders for the 21st century: Lessons from around the world . Paris: OECD.

Spillane, J. P.; Paquin Morel, R.; Al-Fadala, A. 2019. Educational leadership: A multilevel distributed perspective . Qatar: WISE.

Tournier, B.; Chimier, C.; Childress, D.; Raudonyte, I. 2019. Teacher career reforms: Learning from experience . Paris: IIEP-UNESCO.

UNESCO. 2016. Incheon declaration and framework for action for the implementation for sustainable development goal 4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning . Paris: UNESCO.

––––. 2017. A guide for ensuring inclusion and equity in education . Paris: UNESCO.

––––. 2018. Activating policy levers for Education 2030: The untapped potential of governance, school leadership, and monitoring and evaluation policies . Paris: UNESCO.

––––. 2019a. Policy brief: School leadership in Central Asia . Paris: UNESCO.

––––. 2019b. Teacher policy development guide . Paris: UNESCO.

UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund). 2009. Child friendly schools manual . New York: UNICEF.

United Nations. 2015. Transforming our world: The 2030 agenda for sustainable development . New York: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

Vaillant, D. 2015. School leadership, trends in policies and practices, and improvement in the quality of education . Paris: UNESCO.

VVOB. 2018. Putting SDG4 into practice: School leadership. Technical brief no. 1 . Brussels: VVOB.

––––. 2019. Annual report 2018: Unlocking the potential of teachers and school leaders for SDG4 . Brussels: VVOB.

––––. 2020. Leading, teaching and learning together: Report on the early impact of the programme . Brussels: VVOB.

World Bank. 2018. World development report 2018: Learning to realize education’s promise . Washington, DC: World Bank Group.

Yamauchi, F. 2014. An alternative estimate of school-based management impacts on students’ achievements: Evidence from the Philippine s. Policy Research working paper WPS 6747, Impact Evaluation series no. IE 113. Washington, DC: World Bank Group.

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