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.

Persistent inequities in STEM education underscore the need for teachers who can integrate rigorous content instruction with equity-focused, socially and emotionally supportive practices. This study examined how preservice secondary STEM teachers conceptualize their emerging professional identities, beliefs about social and emotional learning (SEL), and the relationship between SEL and equity in shaping their pedagogy. Using a phenomenological approach, we conducted semi-structured interviews with eight student teachers enrolled in an undergraduate credential program in the Western United States. Interviews were analyzed through a combination of deductive coding informed by the transformative SEL (T-SEL) framework and inductive open coding to capture emergent themes. Findings revealed that participants defined their professional identities as facilitators and advocates for equity, while navigating tensions between relational commitments and systemic expectations that privilege content delivery. Teachers consistently articulated SEL as essential to fostering engagement, resilience, and critical thinking in STEM classrooms, yet reported gaps between beliefs and enactment due to time pressures, credentialing requirements, and disciplinary norms. Participants further described SEL and equity as deeply interconnected, framing SEL as a tool for amplifying student voice and affirming cultural identity. These findings highlight the promise of integrating equity-centered SEL within STEM teacher preparation to support early-career development.

Purpose: This paper illuminates and amplifies enduring wisdom from the everyday experiences of thriving women of color social justice school leaders who receive and give microaffirmations as an essential part of their asset-based leadership praxis. This study contributes to the knowledge base that informs leadership scholarship and practice in service of creating the conditions that truly support and sustain a diverse educator workforce. Design/methodology/approach: This study uses a purposive case study of four women of color social justice school leaders. Information was gathered over multiple years based on four volunteers from a professional development support network. Sources include ten observations of affinity-based network meetings; eight in depth, semi-structured interviews, feedback surveys and written accounts of participants; descriptive and reflective field notes and artifacts including publicly accessible material. Findings: Our analysis suggests that receiving diverse types of microaffirmations sustained participants’ resilience in the face of persistent racial and gendered microaggressions. Their social justice leadership praxis touches various levels of school organizations, indicating how microaffirmations serve as a key strategy for coping with a singular paradox: being punished (i.e. microaggressions) for doing transformative leadership. Originality/value: This paper makes an important contribution by centering rich insights from participants who are multiply marginalized leaders by focusing on microaffirmations as a response to microaggressions. This study connects concepts and constructs from different disciplines (leadership, race and gender).