Cultivating Resilience During Unusual Times: Voices of School Principals in California

• In Event: Cultivating Resilience During Challenging Times: Stories of Underrepresented and Marginalized Leaders

Abstract

Over the past four and a half years, principals have been faced with the challenge of leading amidst great changes and uncertainty (Harris & Jones, 2020). Being on the front line to deal with both catastrophic events and everyday uncertainties, principals tend to be put in a position not only to practice crisis leadership (Grissom & Condon, 2021), but also to lead schools for equity—an increasingly challenging role for many leaders in a climate of division. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine ways in which principals cultivated resilience during exceptionally challenging times. The study put forth the following inquiry:1) What kinds of work-related stressors did school leaders encounter during challenging times?; and 2) How did school leaders cultivate resilience as they led their schools during unusual and challenging times?

Theoretical Framework: We employed risk and resilience framework (Author, 2022) with an emphasis on resilience for school principals (Day & Leithwood, 2007; Gu & Day, 2013; Day, 2014) to examine the ways in which school principals cultivated and navigated wellbeing in times of uncertainty and pain. Furthermore, research on resilience among educators suggests that in addition to individual factors, the impact of contextual factors such as policies and the school climate within which they operate can impact the development of individual resilience (Harrison, 2012). Thus, we employ Bronfenbrenner (2006) alongside notions of risk and resilience to conceptualize how an individual develops both inside and across the multiple, interacting, constitutive levels of the environment around them.

Method: Data for this study was collected from a broader survey of 209 school leaders in California that used validated scales to measure risk and resilience. Both the closed and open-ended responses from the survey were analyzed through thematic reflexive coding (Bruan & Clarke, 2006) to excavate the most salient patterns and themes among the data. Multiple researchers met to confer on the themes and codebook before applying a set of codes across all open-ended responses. While researchers performed an analysis of both closed and open-ended responses, this symposium will primarily focus on the voices of the school principals through the open-ended responses.

Results: Our analysis revealed key insight into how principals cultivate resilience across the different levels of their ecological contexts whilst fostering their wellbeing in uncertainty and crisis. Almost half the principals were found to navigate resilience at the individual level of the ecological system, utilizing strategies such as physical activity, physical wellbeing (i.e., sleep, healthy eating), mental wellbeing (i.e., therapy and counseling), positive thinking, hobbies, and maintaining work-life boundaries. Yet, few Principals described experiences of resilience and support from the exosystem of the framework, thus offering insight into the nexus of wellbeing across levels.

Scientific or scholarly significance: Although this study reveals leaders’ experiences in California across multiple ecological levels, voices shared are expected to bring insights to the international scholarship and practice as to how leadership can be cultivated in challenging times towards a futurity of remedy in a role that has long been a site of strife.

Authors

• Aukeem A. Ballard, University of California - Berkeley

• Rebecca Cheung, University of California - Berkeley

• Chunyan Yang, University of Maryland

• Ozge Hacifazlioglu, University of California - Berkeley

• Meg Stomski, University of California - Berkeley