School principal roles during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

School principal leadership has a vital role in school performance. The COVID-19 pandemic brings new challenges for the school principal leadership in developing countries. Thus, this study aimed to identify those new challenges. Specifically, this article explains the role of School Principal Leadership in facing those challenges in maintaining teachers' and students' performances, building parents' support, and applying government regulations. This study was conducted by following a systematic literature review approach. There were four steps conducted in this study: designing the review, conducting the review, analyzing, and writing the review. The researchers collected the data from the articles published in international journals indexed by Scopus. Then, the collected data were analyzed qualitatively using an interactive data analysis model. This study found that school principal leadership faces new challenges in maintaining the teachers' motivation to teach and students' motivation to study through online learning. Besides, the school principals also have to educate the parents to monitor their children's learning. At the same time, the school principals also need to ensure that the schools follow the government regulation on preventing the spread of COVID-19. The detailed findings and suggestions for further research are presented in this article.