Academia.eduAcademia.edu
ACADEMIA Letters Educational leadership in vulnerable contexts during the age of COVID-19 Mireia Tintore Elvira Congosto Inmaculada Egido Arturo Galán Just before the COVID-19 crisis and closure occurred, a group of Spanish researchers were teaching a pilot course for school leadership teams (LTs) in the context of a project entitled “Leadership Programme for a Whole Child Development in Disadvantaged ContextsWCDL”. The required changes were so many that the researchers decided to document and describe the process of fighting against the crisis. Consequently, the research’s main objective was to describe how eight leadership teams in vulnerable schools faced the COVID-19 crisis and whether their actions coincide with those described by academics for leadership in times of crisis. Leadership competences in times of crisis Research on crisis management in the educational environment has been scarce and related to some specific contexts and problems, partially because “never before have we witnessed educational disruption on such a scale” (UNESCO, 2020). However, it is becoming increasingly necessary for school leaders to deal with crises and learn from them, which justifies this investigation. The research follows Smith and Riley’s definition of crisis as “urgent situations that require immediate and decisive action by the organisation and, particularly, by the leaders of that organisation” (2012, p. 58). Due to the especial characteristics of the global COVID-19 Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Mireia Tintore, mtintore@uic.es Citation: Tintore, M., Congosto, E., Egido, I., Galán, A. (2021). Educational leadership in vulnerable contexts during the age of COVID-19. Academia Letters, Article 416. 1 crisis, we also rely on the definition build by Van Wart and Kapucu (2011) for the public sector: “Crisis management, as a response rather than a planning function, is a special type of change management typified by surprise due to the unexpectedness or size of an incident, short time frame, and criticality in terms of life-and-death consequences or organisational threat” (p. 496). The table below (Table 1) shows the characteristics of crisis according to different authors. All these features can define the COVID-19 situation. Table 1. Characteristics of crises According to the literature, leadership abilities required in times of crisis are different from those required in normality times, since different circumstances also require different competencies (Bass 2008; Stogdill 1948; Vroom and Jago 2007, cited by Van Wart & Kapucu, 201, p. 489). Some situations require increased reliance on some behaviours and a deemphasis on others, and this is particularly true in leadership associated with crisis management (Halverson et al. 2004; Mumford et al. 2007; Van Wart and Kapucu, 2011). Table 2 shows these competencies according to different authors and has served as a framework for this investigation’s content analysis. Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Mireia Tintore, mtintore@uic.es Citation: Tintore, M., Congosto, E., Egido, I., Galán, A. (2021). Educational leadership in vulnerable contexts during the age of COVID-19. Academia Letters, Article 416. 2 Table 2. Characteristics and competencies of the leaders facing a crisis Methodology The research methodology used in this study is qualitative and takes both a descriptive and exploratory approach. Our research design allowed us to analyse reality in its natural conAcademia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Mireia Tintore, mtintore@uic.es Citation: Tintore, M., Congosto, E., Egido, I., Galán, A. (2021). Educational leadership in vulnerable contexts during the age of COVID-19. Academia Letters, Article 416. 3 text, as it happened, trying to interpret phenomena according to the meanings they have for the people involved. Participants were 21 school leaders from eight elementary and secondary schools located in Madrid’s Community (Spain). The schools taking part in the research were in social vulnerability areas and serve families of lower socioeconomic status, , mostly socially stigmatised or immigrant groups. Apart from the problems associated with this kind of poor neighbourhoods, other issues add to this situation, for example: high teacher mobility, teacher burnout, and a lack of financial resources. Data were obtained from a focus group (Krueger & Casey, 2012) formed to ascertain how leaders felt and respond to the COVID-19 educational crisis two months after the closures. The answers to the interview script were recorded while taking field notes. The following steps involved transcribing the content and analysing the data through an inductive process that allowed us to establish analytical categories based on content, namely the school leaders’ leadership competencies and behaviours concerning families, teaching and non-teaching staff, and students. Successive stages in the development of the crisis were also defined and considered for the analysis. Results In the face of a crisis, the researchers studied what competencies and behaviours (based on Table 2) must the people in charge have and how these characteristics have manifested in the leaders and Leadership teams (LT) of the current research (Tintoré et al., 2021). In addition, the researchers detected three different moments with similar characteristics. 1st phase: Confusion —- 2nd phase: Diagnosis of needs — 3rd phase: Solutions and monitoring 1st phase: Principals and other managers demonstrated their leadership through selfcontrol by remaining calm at critical moments while helping the rest of the educational community do the same in such extraordinary circumstances. The also maintained their ability to remain focused on the organisation’s priority objective: student learning. 2nd phase: The principals’ leadership focused on setting priorities to achieve the students’ learning and well-being. Support for people through understanding and empathy also stand out and their ability to see beyond the specific problem and use what has been learned to anticipate similar situations in the future. Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Mireia Tintore, mtintore@uic.es Citation: Tintore, M., Congosto, E., Egido, I., Galán, A. (2021). Educational leadership in vulnerable contexts during the age of COVID-19. Academia Letters, Article 416. 4 3rd phase: Principals demonstrated their leadership through their ability to cultivate collaboration within the educational institution by motivating and caring for people. It is also evidenced by their creative search for solutions and rapid decision-making. The results indicate that all the competencies defined by the literature for leaders in times of crisis, except for one (intuition) were developed by the teams that participated in the research. Not using intuition can be explained by the fact that in such special times it is difficult to intuit what may happen next. Discussion and Conclusions The current research aspired to contribute to the literature by showing leaders’ competencies and practices to deal with the COVID-19 crisis. In such disruptive times, a deeper understanding of leaders’ behaviours in crisis times can help other educational leaders during the current period of uncertainty and enhance future leadership training. Our research shows that, without any formal knowledge of the academic literature’s leadership characteristics for this type of situation, the LTs have nevertheless put them into practice. Therefore, communicative ability, flexibility, delegation, optimism, empathy, lateral thinking, creativity, and decisive decision-making are characteristics that we would highlight in the principals participating in our study as noted before by De la Fuente (2003), Gurr, (2020), Klann, (2003), Pascual et al. (2016), Smith and Riley (2012) and Van Wart and Kapucu, (2011). What is more, they have focused on the pedagogical without forgetting their educational communities’ other socio-emotional needs (Biag et al., 2021). Also, the crisis made it possible that the LTs could: • Map the technological situation of families and students. • Improve the educational community’s digital skills and experiment with other working ways (Jiménez, 2020). • Empathise, relate better to other members of the community, and collaborate in searching for solutions (Gurr, 2020). • Demonstrate the leadership of principals emphasising the leadership of other staff members, mainly through their proactive, creative, and supportive attitudes • Show that leadership works best when everyone is committed to a common purpose, which in this case was to continue the schooling of students. Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Mireia Tintore, mtintore@uic.es Citation: Tintore, M., Congosto, E., Egido, I., Galán, A. (2021). Educational leadership in vulnerable contexts during the age of COVID-19. Academia Letters, Article 416. 5 None of this was easy, and it involved much time and effort, certainly more than what is usual. Furthermore, despite the efforts mentioned above, it is still essential to enhance technological resources in those schools, train teachers, and adapt students to this new form of education (Cóndor-Herrera, 2020). The crisis taught us that we need to improve our use of technology for teaching, but we must also increase our humanity. Thus, to keep up with new needs, leaders, teachers, and future teachers should improve their technical, personal, and socio-emotional capacities. The changes must also affect the educational authorities. It is imperative to tackle the digital divide, and the small advances made during the pandemic can help generate the necessary change. The change could start with technology, but it must be much more profound and address students’ complete needs while counting on families. In the face of this profound social and educational change, the educational sector can take advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to generate new responses to new needs, not only doing things but also doing things better. As in all research, it is necessary to note that this work suffers from certain limitations. Firstly, the number of leaders who answered our questions is small, although sufficient for this type of study. The sample is significant because they are administrators carrying out their tasks in highly vulnerable schools, considered a representative. Secondly, we must point out that the events’ proximity can detract from both the answers and our interpretations. On the other hand, however, collecting stakeholders’ experiences in the precise moment when exceptional events occur can be of great future importance. In this sense, some of the literature and documents consulted may be compromised by this proximity, as in many cases, they are reports prepared considering these events or are comments in the media by academics responding to the urgency of the situation. Notwithstanding the above, these months of closure will potentially affect all who experienced them. In exploring how this group of principals faced the pandemic and converted the crisis into a challenge and opportunity through collaboration, this contribution may be valuable to other administrators and future leadership training courses. Funding This research has been carried out within the framework of a Leadership Program for a Whole Child Development in contexts of special difficulty, designed and implemented by the European Foundation Society and Education (Spain) and by the Centre for Studies on PortugueseSpeaking Peoples and Cultures (Portugal), with the support of Porticus, the international organisation that manages and develops the philanthropic programmes of charitable entities Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Mireia Tintore, mtintore@uic.es Citation: Tintore, M., Congosto, E., Egido, I., Galán, A. (2021). Educational leadership in vulnerable contexts during the age of COVID-19. Academia Letters, Article 416. 6 established by Brenninkmeijer family entrepreneurs (REF. EFSE / 020182022). References Biag, M., Gomez, L. M., Imig, D. G., & Vasudeva., A. (2021). Responding to COVID-19 with the aid of mutually beneficial partnerships in education.Frontiers in Education (Lausanne), 5 doi:10.3389/feduc.2020.621361 Cóndor-Herrera O (2020) Educar en tiempos de COVID-19. CienciAmérica 9(2): 31-37. doi:10.33210/ca. v9i2.281 Coombs W (2006) Code red in the boardroom: Crisis management as organizational DNA. Westport, CT: Praege. De la Fuente PL (2003) Liderazgo en tiempos de crisis. Bcn 806: 151-157. Gurr, D. (2020). Educational Leadership and the Pandemic. Academia Letters, Article 29. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL29. Elliott D., Harris, K and Baron S (2005) Crisis management and service marketing. Journal of Services Marketing 19(5): 336-345. Halverson SK, Holladay CL, Kazama SM and Quiñones MA (2004) Self-sacrificial behavior in crisis situations: The competing roles of behavioral and situational factors. The Leadership Quarterly 15(2): 263-275. doi: 10.1016/j.leaqua.2004.02.001 Jiménez JC (2020) Polémicas Educativas en Confinamiento. Revista Internacional de Educación para la Justicia Social, 9(e). https://revistas.uam.es/riejs/article/view/12084/12006 Klann G (2000) Crisis leadership: Using military lessons, organizational experiences, and the power of influence to lessen the impact of chaos on the people you lead. North Carolina, USA: Center for Creative Leadership. Krueger RA and Casey MA (2012) Focus Groups: A Practical Guide for Applied Research. 5th edition. Singapore/Washington: Sage. Mumford MD, Friedrich TL, Caughron JJ and Byrne CL (2007) Leader cognition in realworld settings: How do leaders think about crises? The Leadership Quarterly 18(6): 515543. doi: 10.1016/j.leaqua.2007.09.002 Pascual J, Larraguibel D, Zenteno D and Guarda F (2016b) Liderazgo escolar en tiempos de crisis. el caso de dos liceos del centro sur de chile después del 27F. REICE. ReAcademia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Mireia Tintore, mtintore@uic.es Citation: Tintore, M., Congosto, E., Egido, I., Galán, A. (2021). Educational leadership in vulnerable contexts during the age of COVID-19. Academia Letters, Article 416. 7 vista Iberoamericana Sobre Calidad, Eficacia Y Cambio En Educación, 14(2), 45-62. doi:10.15366/reice2016.14.2.003 Smith L and Riley D (2012) School leadership in times of crisis. School Leadership and Management 32(1): 57-71. doi:10.1080/13632434.2011.614941 Tintore M, Congosto E, Egido I & Galán A (2021). Educational leadership in vulnerable contexts. Principals in the age of COVID-19. WELS online conferences. World Education Leadershp Symposium. 2021. WELSfocus (Feb. 1, 2021): COVID-19 Educational Research (CovER): Crisis in Society and Impact on Education around the World UNESCO 2020 https://es.unesco.org/covid19/educationresponse/consecuencias (retrieved 20 April 2020) Van Wart M and Kapucu N (2011) Crisis management competencies. Public Management Review 13(4): 489-511. doi:10.1080/14719037.2010.525034 Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Mireia Tintore, mtintore@uic.es Citation: Tintore, M., Congosto, E., Egido, I., Galán, A. (2021). Educational leadership in vulnerable contexts during the age of COVID-19. Academia Letters, Article 416. 8