Leading Learning During Crises: A School Principal Reflection

Abstract

This study designed as a narrative inquiry describes the journey of a school principal in the context of a small private school in Beirut Lebanon during the period of compounded crisis that started in October 2019 and continued through the global pandemic and the major economic and financial crises both still impacting the education sector in the country till the time of the completion of the project. The study aims to explore the instructional supervision functions that the principal focused on during this period of time: 1) the principal’s actions and decisions taken to ensure that learning remains effective in the different school modalities as well as the 2) supervisory approach used to lead learning and 3) the instructional supervision functions that the principal emphasized to overcome the challenges to students’ learning brought about by the compounded crisis.

Data was collected from the principal own experience and her documented communications with different stakeholders during this period of time. The findings were discussed in light of the literature review and the selected theoretical models of instructional supervision by Glickman et al. (2018) and Sergiovanni and Starrat (2007). The results indicated that the principal responded to the crisis while keeping the focus on learning, emphasizing the instructional supervision functions of building teachers’ capacity, ensuring instructional quality and warranting students engagement using a mixture of directive and informational directive approaches to decision making. The principal had to adopt a new set of characteristics, namely flexibility, adaptability and agility as well as empathy, collaboration and continuous communication. These characteristics coupled with a focus on leading the learning as synthesized from the data helped the principal get through the compounded crisis. Finally, implications for practice and recommendations for further research were shared.