📑 School leadership during a pandemic: navigating tensions

Deborah Netolicky unpacks some of the challenges associated leading during the pandemic. She discusses the need to act both ‘fast and slow’:

In a time of crisis, leaders must act swiftly and with foresight but also with careful consideration of options, consequences and side effects of actions taken. They must communicate with clarity and purpose but also with empathy and humanity.

The culture of autonomy that has arisen out of necessity:

Leadership is not a title but an action, a behaviour, a practice, a doing and a way of being, and the current scenario has provided a crucible for teacher agency, agility, resilience and innovation.

With a sense of autonomy has come a culture of sharing and generosity:

There is a feeling that around the world, despite our different contexts, we are facing similar challenge and are “all in this together”. This is resulting in generosity of sharing and of support.

This situation has brought back a reminder of the human at the heart of education:

At this time more than ever, we must consider humans before outcomes, students before results and well-being before learning.