Positive leadership: animating purpose, presence, passion and play for flourishing in schools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this multiyear research study is to examine leadership in K-12 schools using a positive organizational perspective to understand how to foster, support and encourage flourishing in schools. In this article, the authors describe the lived experiences of a small group of principals and vice-principals in K-12 schools describing how they have experienced flourishing in their work. Design/methodology/approach The research was carried out using a qualitative, phenomenological approach to examine the lived, concrete and situated experiences of a small sample of school administrators ( N = 9) in two school districts in the province of British Columbia, Canada. Data were collected through individual interviews that were designed to be appreciative in nature. These lasted between 60 and 90 min, were recorded and transcribed. The interview data were deductively and inductively analyzed and arranged into themes that demonstrate the key components of positive leadership for flourishing in schools, derived from these participants' experiences. Findings Building on and extending their findings that school administrators feel a sense of flourishing when they focus on their work from the values of purpose, passion and play, the authors found that a fourth value, presence, was important for these participants to experience well-being at work. Principals’ sense of well-being was strongly related to the notion of balance in their work and life, which helped them address potential stress and ill-being. Findings suggest that a strengths-based, positive approach to school leadership offers an alternative perspective for supporting and encouraging well-being at work. Research limitations/implications Limitations of this research include the small sample size and the appreciative focus with which the data were collected that meant that participants were providing their experiences from a positive perspective. This article offers a complementary perspective for researching well-being in schools, from a positive, strengths-based approach to examining the work of administrators. Practical implications The authors offer insights into the work of school leaders from an appreciative, strengths-based perspective on understandings and practices that may be useful to principals and vice-principals who wish to enhance their workplace well-being. The authors suggest that administrators can learn to craft their work in ways that highlight existing well-being conditions toward amplifying and sustaining well-being. Working from four animating values for flourishing seemed to promote well-being for this small sample of administrators within the existing challenges and complexities of their work. Originality/value This article offers examples of lived experiences of principal and vice-principal well-being that highlight what happens when school leaders attend to their work from a positive, appreciative, strength-based perspective. This research perspective is an additional source of knowledge about well-being in schools complementing the existing research on well-being from a stress management and reduction perspective.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".