ABSTRACT
Much of the research and writing about teachers’ work and lives focuses on the role played by school leaders in, for example (as we have shown in Chapter 6), creating and developing working conditions, cultures and structures in schools and classrooms through which teachers’ capacities for resilience may be built. However, little has been written about the need for leaders themselves to be resilient. This chapter will draw upon a range of national and international empirical research into successful leadership in which we have been involved, which provides insights into the positive and negative influences upon leaders’ own self-efficacy, sense of commitment, well-being and capacities for resilience. We will suggest that resilience is an essential quality and a necessary capacity for leaders to lead to their best. This is so in part because of the innate complexities of leading and managing in schools; in part because of the influence that heads must exercise with a range of stakeholder groups and individuals in the process of school improvement efforts; and in part because such efforts take place in shifting and sometimes conflicting reform contexts which tend to increase and intensify leaders’ work and lives. Resilience has always been desirable in principalship but has now become an imperative. It is somewhat surprising, therefore, that there is little extant research on the nature and enactment of resilience and its relationship to successful principalship. Given the claim that principals’ influence on students is second only to that of classroom teachers (Leithwood et al., 2006b), this is surprising.
