Leadership for learning: lessons from the great lockdown

ABSTRACT

The great lockdown of 2020 presented educational organizations around the world with unprecedented challenges, not least to leadership. For the research reported on here, thirteen leaders of schools, colleges and universities were interviewed about how they coped with the situation. It was found that, while the participants were undoubtedly leading in a crisis, they did not exhibit all of the classic signs of crisis leadership. Instead, they remained instructional leaders, but in circumstances radically different from those imagined by any literature on the subject. The degree to which a movement online added formality to relationships between leaders and followers proved to be a major problem, one which encouraged the conclusion that caution should be exercised when envisaging the lockdown period as any kind of template for a technology-enabled future for education as a practice.

Acknowledgement

The authors are grateful to Professor Ganakumaran Subramaniam for his invaluable feedback during the drafting process for this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The authors received no funding for the research reported in this article.

Notes on contributors

Adrian Jarvis

Adrian Jarvis is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Academic Partnerships and Engagement, University of Nottingham Malaysia.

Pradip Kumar Mishra

Pradip Kumar Mishra is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Academic Partnerships and Engagement, University of Nottingham Malaysia.