Session Information
26 SES 03 C, School Leadership and COVID-19: The Aftermath Experiences
Paper Session
Contribution
In the winter of 2020, schools worldwide transformed from classroom learning to distance learning, as Covid-19 spread around the globe, affecting 90% of the world’s student population and forcing some 60 million teachers to switch to distance teaching (UNESCO, 2020). Thus, the pandemic seems to be the most disruptive event in the history of education, one whose waves and backlash necessitated rapid – at times even daily – changes of educational systems’ guidelines, which included suspension of all classroom teaching, switching to new learning and teaching modalities, and monitoring the health of students and their families (Reimers and Schleicher, 2020).
A crisis can be defined as an unexpected occurrence that may have adverse effects on stakeholders’ expectations and organizational performance (Coombs, 2007). A crisis in the educational system can threaten the safety, stability, and well-being of the school community, where students, teachers, and families are exposed to trauma, threat, and loss (Smith and Riley, 2012). In this regard, crisis management requires resilience and efficiency; school principals must systematically prepare for the crisis in order to minimize its potential damage. Failure to adequately prepare for a crisis may lead to management failure, and negative short- and long-term consequences (Bilgin and Oznacar, 2017). During a crisis, leadership is not oriented toward the future as its main focus, but deals with events, feelings and consequences in the here and now, with the aim of minimizing personal and organizational harm within the school community (Smith and Riley, 2012).
While previous research on educational systems in times of crisis has focused on crises such as terrorist attacks (Brickman et al., 2004), natural disasters like hurricanes Katrina (Bishop et al., 2015) and Harvey (Hemmer and Elliff, 2019), and school shootings (Connolly-Wilson and Reeves, 2013; Oredein, 2010), research on educational leadership during global health crises remains scarce, calling for broader empirical investigations and conceptual frameworks (Gurr, 2020; Harris, 2020). It is especially important to promote an understanding of the unique dynamic in leading schools over the sustained period of a global pandemic crisis. To date, the changes in the principals’ role have scarcely been examined, and we need to know more about their perceptions during such crises, the changes in their work, and how they perceive their role during the pandemic.
In the present study, we explored school principals’ leadership role during the Covid-19 crisis by examining the metaphors they used to describe their work and the changes imposed by the pandemic. Metaphors are a component of figurative language, reflecting cognitive processes through which humans encounter the world, perceive reality, and envision change (Witherspoon and Crawford, 2014). Murray and Rosamund (2006) view a metaphor as a basic mechanism of cognition. Thus, the essence of the metaphoric process is the very thinking about an issue in terms that are unlike those of its original field. In education, metaphors can unify language, cognition, and emotions along with social and cultural dimensions. School principals use broader symbolic systems to make sense of their everyday experience. The metaphors principals use can help researchers understand their expectations of themselves and of their role in times of crisis. Being mental linguistic structures, metaphors can represent school principals' new understanding of contradictory messages and their attempts to make sense of complex, ambiguous work environments during a pandemic (Author 3 and Colleague, 2021). Here, metaphors were used to explore how principals reflected on their role during the Covid-19 crisis, highlighting their use of language to define their leadership role and practices.
Method
Research design We choose a qualitative methodology to explore the metaphors that school principals used to describe their role dealing with the complexities of early phase of the Covid-19 pandemic. Participants Participants in this qualitative study, conducted in Israel, were 42 middle-school principals – 20 from the Arab sector and 22 from the Jewish sector (17 women and 25 men) from 23 urban schools, and 19 rural ones. They were from all school districts, and from different subcultures of both Arab society (e.g., Druze) and Jewish society (e.g., state-religious school). Data collection The interviews, conducted on Zoom, were held from November 2020 to February 2021 with principals who had worked during the Covid-19 imposed lockdown and crisis. The research tool was a semi-structured in-depth interview, allowing researchers to gain profound knowledge of the participants’ personal perspectives, and reveal emotions, beliefs, motives, perceptions, and interpretations (Marshall and Rossman, 2011). Participants were asked about their perceptions of the principal’s role during a crisis and used metaphors to illustrate this perception. Examples of questions: 1. How do you experience your role as principal in light of the Covid-19 crisis? 2. Which metaphor/image describes your experience as principal during the pandemic? All participants were fully informed of the aims of the study and were promised complete confidentiality as well as full retreat options. Pseudonyms were assigned to all interviewees. Transcripts were translated from Hebrew to English by a professional translator. Data analysis The two-stage analysis exposed, expanded, and verified principals' metaphors through ongoing simultaneous data collection and analysis. Stage 1 was vertical analysis, in which the content of participants' answers was analyzed, in Stage 2, comparative horizontal analysis, we searched for common themes as well as contrasting patterns, meant to clarify the differences and similarities arising from each participant's personal voice (Merriam, 2009). Data analysis followed Marshall and Rossman’s (2011) four stages, namely, organizing the data, generating tentative themes, testing the emergent themes, and searching for alternative explanations. Trustworthiness Several measures, taken at different stages of the study, ensured trustworthiness. First, the diversity of the study participants was maintained, in terms of gender, seniority in post, school sector, and geographical school districts. Second, all authors conducted the analytical process described above. Third, to evaluate the soundness of the data, we conducted a member check (Schwartz-Shea, 2006) with all participants, sending transcripts back to the principals, requesting to evaluate their responses and make additions.
Expected Outcomes
The content analysis revealed three themes that will be extensively explained in the full paper and presentation: 1. Organizational role The uncertainty, vagueness, and ever-changing directives led the principals to new perceptions of their organizational role. For example, school principals described the following metaphors: It’s like a horse-and-cart, bridge. Principals saw their role as important within the complexity and uncertainty, working through difficulties. For example, school principals described the following metaphors: midwife, Playdough, magician and a bird. 2. Professional role The Covid-19 crisis forced principals to select new forms of action. For example, school principals described the following metaphors: A ship/ captain of a ship/ a ship in a storm of instability/ captain of a ship being tossed in a storm was another metaphor for their role as principals during the pandemic. The metaphors that principals used to describe their role underscored the expansion of their area of responsibility and availability to the school. For example, school principals described the following metaphors: juggler, work without boundaries, 24/7, navigator, and fire fighter. 3. Emotional role The principals also referred to their emotional experiences of the crisis and their role with respect to the school staff and stakeholders. For example, school principals described the following metaphors: being alone on the battlefield, a lone wolf, sponge, remote control, tightrope walker. The relationships between principals and the team were based on leading the team during the crisis, guiding its members, and directing them toward the road of success. For example, school principals described the school principal’s emotional role by the following metaphors: the light at the end of the tunnel, sun, navigator, fatherhood, and holder. The current study adds to the relatively scarce research examining school leaders’ role during a pandemic crisis, providing theoretical and practical implications as well as further research avenues.
References
Bilgin H and Oznacar B (2017) Development of the Attitude Scale towards crisis and chaos management in education. Eurasia Journal of Mathematics, Science and Technology Education 13(11): 7381–7389. Brickman HK, Jones SE and Groom SE (2004) Evolving school crisis management since 9/11. Education Digest 69(9): 29–35. Connolly-Wilson C and Reeves M (2013) School safety and crisis planning considerations for school psychologists. Communique 41: 16–17. Coombs W (2007) Ongoing crisis communication: planning, managing and responding. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Gurr D (2020) Editorial note. International Studies in Educational Administration 48:1–3. Harris A (2020) COVID-19: School leadership in crisis? Journal of Professional Capital and Community 5(3/4): 321–326. Hemmer L and Elliff DS (2019) Leaders in action: the experiences of seven Texas superintendents before, during and after Hurricane Harvey. Educational Management Administration and Leadership 48: 964-985. Marshall C and Rossman GB (2011) Designing qualitative research. 5th ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Merriam SB (2009) Qualitative research: a guide to design and implementation. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Murray K and Rosamund M (2006) Introducing metaphor. London, UK: Routledge. In Niesche (Eds.), Empirical leadership research: Letting the data speak for themselves (pp. 165–198). New York, NY: Untested Ideas Research Center. Oredein AQ (2010) Principals’ decision-making as correlates of crisis management in southwest Nigerian secondary schools. International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning 6: 62–68. Reimers FM and Schleicher A (2020) A framework to guide an education response to the covid-19 pandemic of 2020. Paris: OECD. Schwartz-Shea P (2006) Judging quality: Evaluative criteria and epistemic communities. In D Yanow and P Schwartz-Shea (Eds.) Interpretation and method: Empirical research methods and the interpretive turn (pp. 89–113). New York, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Smith L and Riley D (2010) The Business of School Leadership. Camberwell, Australia: Acer Press. Smith L and Riley D (2012) School leadership in times of crisis. School Leadership & Management 32(1): 57–71. UNESCO (2020) Global Education Monitoring Report 2020: Inclusion and Education – All Means All. Paris: UNESCO. Witherspoon NA and Crawford ER (2014) Metaphors of leadership and spatialized practice. International Journal of Leadership in Education 17: 257–285.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.