The crisis of COVID-19 affected education systems around the globe and changed the traditional teaching and learning process in school organizations. Undoubtedly, this crisis placed pressure on teachers and school principals (Gurr & Drysdale, 2021; Walls & Seashore, 2021; Kafa, 2021). In particular, teachers’ challenges included the adjustment to new circumstances and complexities of meeting students’ needs remotely, while maintaining high academic expectations (Burgin, Daniel & Wasonga, 2021). At the same time, school principals had an important role to play and needed to maintain their leadership dynamic and guidance to navigate through this particular crisis, referring to school principals’ indirect impact on students’ learning outcomes (Harris, 2020; Netolicky, 2020; Kafa & Pashiardis, 2020; Kafa, 2021). Currently, a number of empirical studies from around the world are providing information on school leaders’ tactics and roles during the pandemic crisis based on collected evidence from school principals (e.g. Ärlestig, Breslin, Johansson, Gombe & Pashiardis, 2021). Yet, limited to no existing research data has been presented on teachers’ perspectives on how school principals, at their schools, addressed this particular crisis and to what extent a supportive approach was promoted amidst this crisis. Therefore, based on teachers' staff prespectives in the Greek context,  this particular study will provide empirical data on school principals’ reaction during the pandemic crisis. In particular, the following research questions guided our study:  

1. How did school principals communicate with teachers in tackling the pandemic crisis?

2. What kind of leadership aspects were communicated to teachers in tackling the pandemic crisis?

3. What were the main obstacles that school principals had to face during the pandemic crisis from teachers’perspective?

In order to elicit information for our research questions, we have conducted interviews and focus groups with 40 teachers from the Greek context working in both primary and secondary education. All the teachers who took part in the study were students of the MA programme "Educational Leadership and Administration" at Frederick University. A semi-structured interview protocol was designed with 25 different questions, in order to provide answers to our three research questions. In particular, the interview protocol was divided into three different sections. The first section included questions referring to the communication between the school principal and the teachers in tackling the pandemic crisis. The second section included questions for acknowledging school principals’ leadership aspects in dealing with the pandemic crisis, whilst the third section included questions for providing the aspect of school principals’ obstacles during the pandemic crisis. The collected data were analyzed using the open coding analysis method and organized into themes, by creating tables in Word, based on the three research questions mentioned above.

Overall, the research findings of this study indicated that even school principals within the centralized education system in Greece faced a lot of obstacles, such as a lack of technological infrastructure, etc., but most of the school principals supported school teachers during this unprecedented crisis. In particular, school principals have promoted a strong aspect of communication with school teachers, using specific communication tools. Also, the results indicated that the effectiveness of school principals in tackling this pandemic crisis was based on the collaboration and support towards the teachers and was thoroughly discussed. Finally, the participants argued about the main obstacles that school principals had to face during the pandemic crisis, based on their perspective and how these obstacles affected them.

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