Crisis leadership: the experiences of six Texas superintendents during the covid-19 pandemic

The purpose of this study was to qualitatively capture and examine the leadership experiences of six superintendents who have navigated and continue to lead their school districts during the COVID-19 pandemic as aligned to the lens of the Boin et al. (2017) Five Critical Tasks of Strategic Crisis Leadership framework. This phenomenological case study design described how the lived experiences (Clandinin & Connally, 1996) of these school superintendents can inform the emerging scholarly literature on leading in times of crisis. While the Boin et al. (2017) framework had five key components of equal weight, findings in this study illuminated decision-making and coordinating grounded in teamwork, trust, and empathy as overarching all other areas including sense-making, meaning-making, accountability, and learning.