Speakers
Description
School leadership is considered to be context-sensitive. This seems plausible as the context in which school leaders are operating changes constantly. Therefore, school principals have to bring effective leadership strategies into a new balance. In our paper, we want to clarify empirically which contexts during the COVID-19 pandemic are relevant for effective school leadership actions and which might be ignored - if necessary. Our sample consists of 301 Austrian school principals of public general and special education schools who participated in the longitudinal S-CLEVER study. The scales assessing the handling of different school principals’ leadership strategies were based on the prior work of Leithwood et al. (2019) and adapted to the Austrian context. We analyzed effects of different contextual layers (e.g. school type, number of teachers, composition of student body) separately for each of the used school principals’ leadership strategies. Our findings suggest that contextual layers can partially explain differences in school leadership strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
