Principals are pivotal for creating schools that meet the needs of all students. However, the exodus of principals has been on the rise especially in the last two years as the pandemic accelerated turnover rates. Principals are experiencing greater levels of workload, stress, and burnout often without the tools for maintaining mental health. While many strategies for self-care are widely discussed—consistent exercise routine, eating healthy, and adequate sleep—many are not easily adaptable for principals who often experience time constraints and inconsistent schedules. The field of positive psychology has shown that interventions focused on human strengths and enhancing positive emotions can significantly boost well-being. The most promising aspect of positive psychology interventions (PPIs) is the ease with which these strategies can be integrated into the busy demands of the principalship. This article provides evidence for PPIs as potential strategies to emotionally and mentally support principals from individual and organizational approaches. Specifically, this article describes several PPI recommendations for principals to practice and begin building upon positive experiences in their daily lives such as savoring and cultivating sacred moments. The article also provides recommendations for school districts to consider such as cognitive-behavioral, solution-focused coaching; positive principal supervisor interventions; and systematic spaces to address principals’ complaints. While these recommendations are not comprehensive, we believe they serve as a starting point for principals to move beyond surviving and toward thriving in their careers.

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.

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to highlight the impacts of psychological and biological health on the principalship, particularly as it relates to sleep. Job-related stress, heavy workloads, and unpredictable work schedules can impact principals’ mental health, diet, and consumptive behaviors, which can disrupt the much-needed restorative sleep for healthy cognition, physiological functioning, and efficacious leadership. We turn the field's attention towards the importance of quality sleep and how it impacts personal health and occupational performance. We provide a robust interdisciplinary review of literature on precursors and outcomes of poor sleep quality as it pertains to school leaders both personally and professionally. Empirical recommendations for improving sleep quality along with recommendations for preparation programs and the field of educational leadership are discussed.

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.

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.

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.