Navigating the Storm: A Qualitative Study of School Principals’ Crisis Leadership Practices

This study explored the crisis leadership practices that school principals perceive as effective and examines how these practices align with an established crisis leadership model. Adopting a qualitative research design, the study is based on in-depth interviews with ten Israeli school principals, focusing on their experiences in managing crises. Data were analyzed using a deductive, directed content analysis approach, with the crisis leadership model serving as the primary coding framework, complemented by inductive coding to identify new themes emerged from participants’ accounts. The findings revealed that principals enacted all seven overarching leadership constructs—compassion and care, openness and communication, adaptiveness, decisiveness, resilience and courage, consultation and collaboration and empowerment—through a combination of common strategies and customized, context-specific practices. Two further constructs emerged from principals’ interviews that were not included in the original framework: operational and logistical preparedness and sensemaking and information verification illustrating how context-specific practices can extend an established model. The study highlights how crisis experiences can generate valuable professional learning and deepen understanding of leadership in challenging contexts. It also sheds light on the impact of crisis leadership on school communities and offers insights into the development of more responsive and context-sensitive leadership practices and models.