Conference Agenda

The years of COVID-19 pandemic have challenged principals’ work and forced them to find new ways to manage their duties and cope as leaders. Leithwood (2012) has discussed the concept of “personal leadership resources'' that covers cognitive resources (e.g. problem-solving expertise, ability to perceive and manage emotions) and psychological resources (e.g. optimism, self-efficacy, resilience). Later Leithwood et al. (2020) have pointed out that these personal resources may provide a framework that explains a large amount of variation in the principals’ practices. In stressful events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, psychological resources become crucial. Principals were managing emotional responses to the crisis such as anxiety, frustration, loss, and anger that can cause emotional exhaustion (Mahfouz, 2020). Research has shown how the years of pandemic brought up principals’ feelings of loneliness and inadequacy, and feelings of uncertainty regarding the future and the wellbeing of their students and staff (Ahtiainen et al. 2022). The Finnish principals have reported how their ability to distinguish the crucial duties from the ones that they needed to postpone was of importance. Moreover, principals who worked in small schools (less than 150 students) and had double roles as principals and teachers, talked about the need to prioritise duties, as their workload increased tremendously (Ahtiainen et al. 2022).

Self-efficacy refers to an individual’s perception of their capability to execute the actions required to successfully complete a certain task (Bandura, 1997; Goddard et al., 2020). Principal efficacy for leadership entails assessment of their personal competence in relation to the core task of a leader; leading practices that enhance student learning in the school (Tschannen-Moran et al., 1998). Self-efficacy is an important factor in an individual's persistence when dealing with challenges, thus contributing to their commitment to educational goals even in difficult situations (Klassen et al., 2011). Principals with strong efficacy-beliefs for leadership have shown to experience less strain and to less often report turnover intentions (Skaalvik, 2020). Principal’s turnover intentions refer to a consideration of changing to another profession (Heikonen et al., 2017) whereas work-related stress is defined as an unpleasant situation in which the principal feels nervous, restless, tense or anxious due to some aspect of work as a principal (Elo et al., 2003).

Principal’s efficacy for leadership is also a central factor in constructing collaboration between teachers and collective efficacy in the teacher community (e.g., Goddard et al., 2015; 2020), which may have further helped teachers together meet the requirements and changes related to schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic (Heikonen et al., under review; Hargreaves & Fullan, 2020). Leading a supportive collaborative climate played a role in supporting teachers during the pandemic (Westphal et al., 2022). In this study, leading collaborative professional climate refers to principal’s efforts to create opportunities for teachers to share practices and support co-operative interaction between them (Honingh & Hooge 2014).

Yet, research on principals’ efficacy for leadership is scarce (Goddard et al., 2020) and not much is known about its association with leading collaborative professional climate, principal’s work-related stress and turnover intentions after the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study aims to gain a better understanding of the associations between principal’s efficacy for leadership, their perceptions of leading collaborative professional climate, their work-related stress and turnover intentions after COVID-19 pandemic. Based on prior literature, three hypotheses were set:

HY1. Principal’s efficacy for leadership is positively associated with perceptions of leading collaborative professional climate and negatively related to work-related stress and turnover intentions.

HY2. Principal’s perceptions of leading collaborative professional climate are negatively associated with work-related stress and turnover intentions.

HY3. Principal’s work-related stress is positively related with their turnover intentions.

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.

This paper builds on a paper presented at ECER 2021 which drew on the first phase of a small-scale longitudinal study examining how current and former students on the Into Headship (IH) programme in Scotland supported their school communities during the first lockdown in the UK, with a particular emphasis on children and young people (CYP) considered to be vulnerable through disability, poverty, being looked after or otherwise disadvantaged. A key finding deriving from phase 1 was the expanding role that schools played in serving their communities, impacting on the role of aspiring headteachers and their sense of identity.

It has been well documented that global inequalities, as identified by Wilkinson and Pickett (2018), have been magnified through the pandemic. An extensive range of commentators highlights the catastrophic global impact of the restrictions and disruption to schooling posed by the pandemic on the mental health and wellbeing of children and on their learning (Lee, 2020; Mowat, in press, 2023a, 2023b; Shum, Skripkauskaite, Pearcey, Waite, & Creswell, 2021; UNESCO et al., 2020; UNICEF, 2021; UNICEF Data, 2020; World Health Organisation, 2020).

Harris and Jones (2020) argue that most existing leadership preparation programmes will need a radical re-think to remain relevant, highlighting that the pandemic has brought to the fore the importance of relational trust and context responsive leadership, dependent on distributive forms of leadership and recognising ‘the wealth of additional expertise, knowledge and local capacity’ (p. 246)) of the community. Other commentators call on the need for adaptive and/or emotionally intelligent leadership (Beauchamp et al., 2021). Fullan (2020) argues that Covid-19 has exposed the fault-lines that were already present in education systems across the world but also provides an opportunity to re-imagine what might be possible. Sahlberg (2020), however, cautions that, unless we stand back and re-imagine a ‘new normal,’ and, more importantly, focus on the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of change rather than just the ‘what,’ it is likely that schools, post-pandemic, will revert towards the status-quo (Mowat, 2023).

Whilst much attention has been devoted to losses in learning brought about by the pandemic and to learning recovery, increasingly attention is turning towards the socio-emotional wellbeing of CYP (Lee, 2020; Mowat, in press; OECD, 2020). UNICEF (2021) highlights the fragility of support systems for children during this period and how the hardships experienced fell disproportionally on the most disadvantaged (p. 16). School leaders have had to navigate an unprecedented landscape of complex and rapid change and therefore the quality of headship preparation programmes becomes crucial in ensuring that prospective headteachers can rise to the challenge.

This small-scale empirical study is supported by a BELMAS grant and focusses on Into Headship, a masters-level programme delivered within a single academic year in partnership with Education Scotland. Through examination of the ways in which IH students supported their school communities during and in the aftermath of lockdown (with a specific, but not sole, focus on more vulnerable CYP), the study seeks to ascertain the degree to and ways in which engagement with the IH programme had prepared them to meet the challenges in order to inform the development of headship programmes in Europe and beyond.

In the spring of 2020, the closure of upper secondary schools was authorised, and all on-site teaching was transferred to distance settings due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The schools were closed almost the entire spring semester. In the autumn, the organisation of schoolwork changed repeatedly concurrently with ever-changing regulations. The aim of this study is to gain understanding of the work experience, tasks and the cooperation school principals and assistant principals had with different stakeholders outside and inside the upper secondary schools during the first year of the pandemic and reflect changes in their agency.

The analytical framework used for this paper relies on neo-institutional theories (Scott, 2014). The definition of the term organisation is relatively similar between the leading scholars. In this paper the term organisation is understood as a unit that is designed around a particular task. However, when it comes to the term institution, the denotation is more varying. Waks (2007) states that institutions form the background of organisations, and Scott (2014) views institutions as having jurisdiction over organisations. According to both Scott and Waks, institutions are somehow in the background of organisations, and in that way, they control what happens within them. In addition, Scott (2014) describes institutions as representing stability, where social structures, created by actors with vested interest, slow down the processes of change and the same actors monitor and resist the intended change. Furthermore, within institutions, as Scott sees it, similar ideas, habits, norms, purposes, and frameworks guide human behaviour and mechanisms.

Other scholars, bringing Selznick’s (1949; 1957) work to life, have a similar understanding of the term institution (see Raffaelli & Glynn, 2015; Washington et al., 2008). They add a useful aspect to the conceptualisations of Scott (2014) and Waks (2007) in relation to change. These scholars describe interactive processes between both the organisational and institutional characteristics of a unit (see Kraatz, 2009; Raffaelli & Glynn, 2015; Washington et al., 2008). They describe how organisations can, for example, change into institutions over time through the processes of institutionalisation (Ansell et al., 2015; Selznick, 1996; Scott, 2014), and how institutional characteristics are loosened through the processes of deinstitutionalisation (Kraatz & Moore, 2002; Oliver, 1992; Scott, 2014). The characteristics of institutional and organisational leadership (Kraatz, 2009; Raffaelli & Glynn, 2015; Selznick, 1949; 1957; Washington et al. 2008) are highly relevant here to better understand the dynamics of change and the school leaders’ perceptions of their own agency, power, and vision when it comes to change at the upper secondary school level in Iceland.

In the light of the above terminology, change takes place within the organisational characteristics of schools, or when institutional characteristics are loosened through the processes of deinstitutionalisation (Kraatz & Moore, 2002; Oliver, 1992; Scott, 2012), and the fact that leaders usually act as organisational leaders when guiding change (Kraatz, 2009; Raffaelli & Glynn, 2015; Washington et al., 2008). In contrast to organisations, institutions represent more stability when diverse actors monitor and attempt to influence an intended change and determine its fate. Leaders acting within the institutional environment usually act as institutional leaders and constrain what takes place by silencing the intended change, reinforcing stability, and protecting the existing values held by groups with vested interest, or even when promoting their own values (Kraatz, 2009; Raffaelli & Glynn, 2015; Washington et al., 2008). Despite these ideas that change mainly takes place within organisational characteristics of units, some scholars (see Scott, 2014; Waks, 2007) describe how institutions change over time.