Navigating Adversity and Opportunity. School Leadership in Times of Crisis

The educational crisis derived from the pandemic and the limited national research on educational leadership in crisis lend us to identify examples of school leadership practices in times of crisis that allowed schools to survive-and even improve-during the Covid-19 Pandemic and Post-Pandemic. The methodology was qualitative, based on 30 semi-structured interviews with directors and teachers at Chilean schools and high schools. Results show the emergence of practices aiming to continue teaching-learning processes, to prioritize the community welfare, to make critical decisions, to have assertive communication, to be flexible, to incentive discussion about the crisis and to distribute leaderships. We conclude that there is a link among the different practices that must be recognized to move towards a more comprehensive approach to educational improvement, while at the same time, academia and public policy are invited to change the paradigm to understand crises as periodic events that involve studying and strengthen leadership that will allow us to face them in the future.