Risk and Resilience During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Voices from Principals in the U.S.

Abstract

In the height of pandemic-era procedures, school principals were challenged to navigate and restructure ways to lead their schools amidst great changes and uncertainty. While leveraging crisis management leadership, principals had to be adaptive and attentive to the emotional wellbeing and health of their employees. Importantly, scholars are starting to understand how school principals have navigated challenges in the COVID-19 pandemic and the tensions explored tensions that principals have experienced as they balance equity, excellence, and accountability while considering both well-being of students, families and teachers, and schools’ outcomes. However, research that examines principal wellbeing alongside resilience factors during COVID-19 pandemic remains scant. This paper examines principals’ perception of work-related stressors as well as strategies that they used to support their resilience during the pandemic to understand principal wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic. We employ ecological system theory to examine how principal wellbeing is influenced by the interaction of their surrounding systems. Results indicate a complicated, synergistic web of wellbeing that converges among systems, relationships, mental health, and moral/ethical foundations that work to construct and constitute factors of wellbeing. Implications for policy, practice, and research are discussed.