Eleanor Su-Keene

This study uses a critical hope lens to examine how a community sustained its advocacy and resistance through narrated counterstories in response to the 2023 state takeover of the Houston Independent School District, one of the largest and most diverse urban school districts in the southern United States. Findings reveal that the community advocated using emotion-oriented tenets of critical hope, such as anger and love, as resources to sustain grassroots resistance to top-down reform by calling out officials, maintaining unity and solidarity, drawing on community knowledge and history, and taking pride in their community schools.

Stressors in the principalship are plentiful, but few studies have examined their differential impacts on work-stress and mental health, particularly from a systems perspective. Guided by Lazarus and Folkman's occupational stress theory and Bronfenbrenner's ecological theory, we conducted an embedded mixed-method design with a quantitative-dominant crossover analysis for hierarchical regression to identify emergent stressors, the systems from which they originate, and whether stressor systems, cumulatively and differentially, predict negative psychological outcomes including work-stress, anxiety, and depression. We identified ten thematic stressors that were organized into five systems based on proximity to the principalship and degree of control: nanosystem, microsystem, macrosystem, exosystem, and chronosystem. In our sample, principals reported high work-stress, moderate anxiety, and mild to moderate depression symptoms. Regression analyses showed that the cumulative number of stressors significantly predict work-stress. However, only system-level stressors, especially nanosystem stressors, predicted anxiety, and depression symptoms. Our study suggests that the amount of stressors shape principals’ perceptions of stress, but only personal impacts from work spillage predicts mental health symptoms.

Principal turnover undermines school improvement efforts, teacher retention, and educational equity, yet research on how psychological and physiological factors influence leadership practice and sustainability is limited. This study draws upon organizational stress theories to model how work-stress influences principals’ intentions to leave their positions through stress, mental health, and sleep. Using survey data from 188 public, noncharter school principals in Texas, US, a path analysis was conducted to examine direct and indirect pathways between work-stress and principals’ leave intentions. Results show that the majority of principals struggle with high work-stress, moderate anxiety and depression symptoms, and poor sleep quality. Further, principals’ anxiety, depression, sleep quality, and leadership self-efficacy were significant mediators between work-stress and leave intentions accounting for nearly 40% of the variance. Stress-induced anxiety was related to lower sleep quality and higher leave intentions, whereas stress-induced depression was related to lower sleep quality and leadership self-efficacy that then act as serial mediators of leave intentions. This finding underscores the unique paths through which mental health conditions operate. While causes of leadership ill-being are systemically rooted, findings from this study highlight stress, mental health, and sleep as malleable levers for change to support principals’ leadership self-efficacy and reduce turnover risk.

Purpose: Principals’ capacity for school improvement efforts is influenced by their leadership self-efficacy which is particularly susceptible to psychological stress. While the impact of work-stress on self-efficacy is a global issue among principals and headmasters, the role of mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression is under-explored. This study aims to examine how work-stress influences leaders’ perception of total, management, instructional and moral self-efficacies and how mental health conditions operate as moderators and/or mediators in these relationships. Design/methodology/approach: We conducted a quantitative study with data collected from Texas, US principals (n = 181–194) and performed a series of regression analyses to examine work-stress and demographic factors as predictors of leadership self-efficacies and the role of mental health as mediators/moderators of significant relationships. Findings: Our findings highlight work-stress as a central negative predictor of leadership self-efficacies, and depression, not anxiety, as a significant partial mediator between work-stress and leadership self-efficacies. Additionally, mental health symptoms were not significant moderators, suggesting that mental health concerns do not affect the strength of the predictive relationships. Practical implications: We provide recommendations for individuals, districts, and principal preparation programs to support leaders’ stress and depression which have downstream effects on principals’ confidence to lead schools. Originality/value: This study extends the literature in school leadership well-being by providing evidence that work-stress induces depression which then negatively impacts principals’ leadership self-efficacy. Simultaneously, principals’ mental health conditions, whether induced by work or other aspects of life including genetic predispositions, do not change the magnitude of the work-stress self-efficacy relationship.

Educational leaders have stressful jobs that have only intensified in recent years. They often feel unprepared for the demands of the role; high workloads and time pressures cut into time for personal relationships, interests, and sleep. Research suggests that sleep quality, one particular aspect of sleep behavior separate from sleep duration, is likely an important part of educational leaders’ ability to lead effectively, manage workload and responsibilities, and be there for staff and students. However, few studies have examined the role of sleep quality in educational leaders’ well-being, particularly for early childhood education leaders. The present study focuses on examining the associations among working conditions, well-being, and sleep quality via structural equation modeling with a national sample of over 1000 early childhood leaders in the US. We found that leader demands, as opposed to resources, were the strongest predictors of sleep quality. However, the effects of leader demands and resources were both indirect, mediated by personal health behaviors and physical and psychological well-being. Alternative model tests revealed that the relationship between working conditions, well-being, and sleep quality is likely bidirectional.

Work-related stress and well-being in school leaders is an increasing concern in education. This paper explores how stress accumulates in a principal’s practice over time, challenging the assumption that stress is static or uniformly experienced. We conducted a single-case, mixed-methods study and collected quantitative data on sleep quality, mental health, health behaviors, and leadership self-efficacy along with qualitative data from four semi-structured interviews and two observations with a single principal. Our findings show that while work-stress was manageable, and even positive at times, increasing workload and systemic challenges led to an accumulation of stress that negatively affected Mary’s overall health and leadership self-efficacy. Her appraisal of work-stress was influenced by factors such as control, agency, complexity of the stressor, and alignment with job expectations. We recommend that principal preparation programs include education on stress management, health, and leadership sustainability, and we call attention to school districts and their role in supporting principals under increasingly complex and uncertain conditions.

In the past five years, studies have demonstrated the intense challenges of COVID-19 on school leadership. In this study, we build upon the body of research and explore how principals re-imagined their leadership purpose, priorities, and practices from a human-centered care perspective. The study takes place in Florida, an epicenter of culture wars that politicized numerous economic, social, and scientific issues, including COVID-19, which adds nuance to the complexity in principals’ leadership. The purpose of this study is to explore how principals reconceptualized their roles during the pandemic and how their practices and priorities aligned with humanism, using a humanistic values of care framework. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with nine principals in South Florida, as well as corresponding school district documents. Our findings revealed that principals adopted health professional identities in response to a health and human safety crisis. They embraced human-centered mindsets and skills that prioritized the diverse challenges and trauma that students and staff were experiencing. Principals not only revamped communication channels but also strategically used these communications to heal, create meaning, and instill a sense of togetherness amid isolation, uncertainty, trauma, and grief. In practicing humanizing leadership, principals were transparent and vulnerable about their own physical, mental, and professional limitations. For a time, these leadership changes replaced traditional models of school leadership. However, we find tensions between humanistic leadership practices and the dehumanizing political and normalizing educational contexts, raising questions about the sustainability of humanistic leadership beyond life-and-death crisis contexts.

Traditionally, preservice teachers (PSTs) have been introduced and socialized to a cartoon of three children attempting to watch a baseball game as the prevailing definition of equity. Yet, in our sociopolitical context where Black, Brown, and LGBTQ+ children are continuously marginalized, we critique whether this simple construction of equity is sufficient. Rather, we build upon these understandings by outlining tenets of critical humanism and exploring the degree to which PSTs fluctuate between technical and humanist conceptualizations in their definitions of equal and equitable instruction. In this large-scale qualitative study using data collected between 2022 and 2024, we analyzed 1,528 PST responses about their conceptualizations of equity and equality. We found that PSTs harbor various conceptualizations of equity that are robust around resource-based teaching attributes such as materials, instruction, and accommodations. However, PSTs presented paradoxical understandings of equity related to treatment and opportunities, revealing tensions between technical and humanizing approaches to education.