Keep Safe, Keep Learning: Principals' Role in Creating Psychological Safety and Organizational Learning During COVID-19

• In Event: Leading Through Crisis: Lessons From School Principals' Leadership During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Purpose

The rapidity with which educators responded to school buildings’ closure and shifts to all aspects of their work at the onset of COVID-19 is unparalleled. School principals were thrust into the role of helping teachers and staff to “unfreeze” (Schein, 2010) and learn new ways to serve their students’ and communities’ many evolving needs. The question, of course, and the one we investigate here, is what degree principals were prepared to fulfill this role. Were they able to, for example, create environments, in which teachers could feel safe to take risks, make mistakes, and learn? How might their ability to do so have varied across schools with differing resources?

Framework

“Psychological safety,” (Edmondson, 1996) is the degree people view their environment as conducive to interpersonally risky behaviors like speaking up or asking for help, and impacts individual and organizational learning (Edmondson & Lei, 2014). Research applying psychological safety to schools (see 2016 special issue in Research in Human Development), paints a complex portrait in which traditional professional norms, mixed leader effectiveness, and the high stakes nature of the work make creating psychological safety critically important and extremely challenging (Authors, 2016a; 2016b) and worthy of our investigation.

Data & Methods

The data comes from a sub-sample of 57 interviews from the larger sample described above and focuses on urban and suburban schools. To form this sample, we used Milner’s (2012) definition of urban schools (e.g., intensive (n=16), emergent (n=11) and characteristic n=12), and selected suburban schools with less than 25% of students receiving free and reduced-price lunch (the U.S. DOE’s designation of a low poverty school (n=18). We analyzed the data thematically using deductive coding (Boyatzis, 1998). Lewin’s (1947) ideas regarding conditions for psychological safety was supplemented with empirical work on psychological safety (e.g., Frazier, 2017) to create the codebook. The team’s process mirrored that of Hruschka et al.’s (2004) process in building intercoder reliability: “the segmentation of text, codebook creation, coding, assessment of reliability, codebook modification, and final coding.” We also wrote analytical memos, returning to the data to clarify, refine, and identify themes (Boyatzis, 1998).

Findings

Findings suggest principals felt the suspension of primary external accountability measures (teaching evaluation and student standardized testing) facilitated opportunities for teachers to feel safer to innovate and take risks. They also reported role modeling making mistakes and using existing structures and creating new ones to bring the school community together and build trust, communication, and hence, greater psychological safety. The degree and type of district oversight rather than urbanicity appeared to create variability in principals’ perceived ability to create psychological safety as well as their and teachers’ corresponding feelings of burnout.

Significance

These findings can expand understanding of leadership to create conditions for learning, and give insight into how the educational system may facilitate or stymy school leaders’ capacity and/or ability to support transformational learning (Drago-Severson & Blum-DeStefano, 2014) during the pandemic, and thus support a better path forward.

Authors

• Jennie Weiner, University of Connecticut

• Joshua Childs, The University of Texas at Austin

• Chantal Francois, Towson University

• Julianna E. Lopez Kershen, Independent Scholar

• Corrie Stone-Johnson, University at Buffalo - SUNY