Abstract:

Research on educational leadership during crisis most often focuses on how a leader’s response to a single crisis event impacts subsequent outcomes. There has not, however, been significant research on how educational bureaucracies can support and build resilience amongst school leadership communities during times of crisis, particularly when educational crises are prolonged or recurrent. In Puerto Rico, a territory with one of the largest school districts in the United States, the Department of Education’s Institute of Professional Development partnered with a consortium of international academics to provide enhanced management training to school principals from 2019-2022, with the intention of measuring this program’s impact on educational outcomes.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting school closures led the management training program to shift from an in-person to an online format. More importantly, the COVID-19 crisis highlighted an additional facet of the program that proved to be key to the Department’s crisis response: providing a remote community of practice to educational leaders who were isolated, managing a global crisis, and were often in crisis themselves. Mixed-methods research collected as part of this project highlights the importance of supportive system-sanctioned learning communities and best practices to curate such communities amongst school leaders during crises.

Given that Puerto Rican principals had already led school communities during several earthquakes and two severe hurricanes shortly prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, their reflections on the Department of Education’s remote learning communities for principals during prolonged and recurring crises shed light on the role that educational bureaucracies can play in increasing systemic resilience. This question is particularly urgent in the wake of extended school closures due to COVID-19, and the increasing frequency of natural disasters that impact educational systems globally.

Keywords:

COVID-19, crisis, educational leadership, management, principals, resilience, system-building.