Cultivating Resilience During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Voices from Principals in the U.S.

At the height of pandemic-era procedures amidst great changes and uncertainty, school principals across the world were challenged to navigate and restructure ways to lead their schools. While leveraging crisis management leadership, principals needed to be attentive and adaptive to the emotional wellbeing and health of their employees. Today scholars are beginning to understand how school principals navigated the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic and to explore the tensions principals experienced as they attempted to balance equity, excellence, and accountability while being mindful of both the wellbeing of students, families, and teachers, and their schools’ outcomes. However, there is still limited research examining principal wellbeing alongside resilience factors during the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to understand ways in which principals build resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper examines the perceptions of work-related stressors of public-school principals in the state of California and the strategies that these principals used to cultivate resilience. We employ ecological system theory to examine how principal wellbeing is influenced by the interaction of their surrounding systems. Our results indicate a complicated, synergistic web of wellbeing that converges among systems, relationships, mental health, and moral/ethical foundations that work to construct and constitute factors of resilience which nurtures their wellbeing. Implications for policy, practice, and research are discussed.