The Self-Care Habits of School Principals

• In Event: Leading, Learning, and Caring: Well-Being and the School Leader

Abstract

Objectives:
The objective of this study was to explore the wellbeing of school principals and the job embedded demands responsible for challenging their adoption of healthy self-care habits.
Framework:
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs served as a framework for designing the investigation into the current state of school leader self-care. Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s (2009) Immunity to Change model informed the way this study framed and explored the obstacles to more effective self-care. Finally, a growing body of research in neurobiology and specifically the work of Joshua Greene (2014) provided the theoretical underpinnings for the connections this paper makes between self-care and the sorts of emotional, physical, and cognitive capacity required to do the work of a school leader. Thus, three tiers of self-care needs were established to inform the study: basic physiological needs such as sleep, hydration, and nutrition; active self-care habits such as exercise, relaxation, and stress relief; and higher order needs such as belongingness and love addressed through work-life balance, volunteerism, and relational belonging.
Methods & Data Sources:
Data were collected on specific habitual practices among participants through multiple-choice and Likert-scale questions, while open-ended sections of the 45 question survey asked participants to explain their experiences within their role that affect how their self-care habits were formed. A total of 1,939 practicing building administrators received the survey, including currently practicing principals, assistant principals, and deans of students who were either listed in the Arkansas Department of Education database or identified through the website affiliated with their school districts. The survey resulted in 473 completed survey responses that were included in this study.
Findings:
Findings from this study indicate that school leaders work longer hours, are more sleep deprived, more dehydrated, have poorer diet habits, exercise less regularly, and spend less time with their friends and family than the general population. Administrators struggled to find ways within their control to improve their self-care behavior and offered suggestions regarding how the structure of the job itself might be changed to facilitate improving the health of school leaders.
Scholarly Significance:
This presentation offers insight into the current state of the wellbeing of school principals, and by better understanding administrators’ self-care habits, this study can inform the field in developing supports, practices, and expectations which promote the health and wellbeing of building-level leaders. Unhealthy self-care habits may influence their effectiveness, happiness, and possibly their longevity within the profession. Data collected through this study informed ideas about policies and procedures that could promote greater opportunities for healthier more effective leaders within schools.

Authors

• Joshua Ray, University of Arkansas at Fayetteville

• John Pijanowski, University of Arkansas at Fayetteville

• Kara Lasater, University of Arkansas at Fayetteville