Teacher leadership is widely thought to be critical to the success of local school improvement efforts. But it’s often unclear what teacher leadership entails, precisely. Supported by district-level staff, and with assistance from a university-based research team (the authors of this article), a group of science teacher leaders created a conceptual framework to guide their work. Teacher leadership, they concluded, involves four main activities: collaborating with teachers, modeling effective instruction, providing resources, and advocating on teachers’ behalf.

Research suggests that diversifying the educator workforce has a strong positive influence on students, particularly vulnerable and historically underserved groups. This article presents an intrinsic case study of a Leaders of Color Network that provided promising design elements to reduce professional and racial isolation, promote collective sense making, and develop coalitions. It also highlights how employers must do more than hire leaders of color. They must create systematic strategies to uplift, empower, and amplify the needs of diverse leaders.

At the height of pandemic-era procedures amidst great changes and uncertainty, school principals across the world were challenged to navigate and restructure ways to lead their schools. While leveraging crisis management leadership, principals needed to be attentive and adaptive to the emotional wellbeing and health of their employees. Today scholars are beginning to understand how school principals navigated the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic and to explore the tensions principals experienced as they attempted to balance equity, excellence, and accountability while being mindful of both the wellbeing of students, families, and teachers, and their schools’ outcomes. However, there is still limited research examining principal wellbeing alongside resilience factors during the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to understand ways in which principals build resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper examines the perceptions of work-related stressors of public-school principals in the state of California and the strategies that these principals used to cultivate resilience. We employ ecological system theory to examine how principal wellbeing is influenced by the interaction of their surrounding systems. Our results indicate a complicated, synergistic web of wellbeing that converges among systems, relationships, mental health, and moral/ethical foundations that work to construct and constitute factors of resilience which nurtures their wellbeing. Implications for policy, practice, and research are discussed.

Despite the positive impact of culturally responsive social emotional learning (CR-SEL) in enhancing students’ academic achievement and emotional resilience, less is known about how it is employed in rural school settings. We employed a case study design to explore how rural transitional kindergarten (TK) teachers in California practice CR-SEL in their classrooms. Ten TK teachers from seven California rural schools were individually interviewed online. Results of the thematic analysis showed three major themes of CR-SEL practices: multicultural and critical perspective development, inclusive environment, and family engagement. Participants identified different strategies to teach CR-SEL practices in their classrooms. Findings extend our understanding of CR-SEL in practice, and provide practical and research implications for school psychologists, educators, and policymakers.

Guided by the social cognitive theory and job demands-resources model, we used multiple regression analyses to examine the concurrent and interactive influences of professional support and efficacy beliefs on compassion fatigue during COVID-19 among 231 school principals in California. Controlling for principals' individual- and school-level demographic factors, professional support and their district collective efficacy (but not self-efficacy) were significantly and negatively associated with compassion fatigue. The negative association between professional support and compassion fatigue was moderated by both collective and self-efficacy. Professional support had a significantly negative association with compassion fatigue only among principals with both lower collective and self-efficacy beliefs. In addition, female principals reported significantly higher compassion fatigue than their male counterparts. Principals who oversee schools with larger student populations (i.e., 500-1,000 students) reported significantly less compassion fatigue than those who lead smaller schools (i.e., less than 200 students). Findings highlighted the importance of promoting principals' efficacy beliefs and increasing professional support to address their compassion fatigue. Findings also indicated that professional support and efficacy beliefs interact with each other in a compensatory way to influence the principal's compassion fatigue concurrently. Practical implications for school psychologists' capacity to support school leaders' compassion fatigue are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).