Exploring How Principals and Coaches Enacted Care to Respond to Teachers’ Needs During the COVID-19 Pandemic

To date, much of the research exploring how principals and coaches functioned amid the COVID-19 pandemic focused on (a) teachers’ needs or (b) how principals and coaches responded to teachers. Largely, these bodies of literature exist in isolation, which helped motivate the current investigation. The purpose of this study was to explore relationships between teachers’ needs and principals’ and coaches’ enactments of care. This study draws upon 24 qualitative interviews collected at two different time points during the COVID-19 pandemic to analyze the ways principals and coaches strategically deployed acts of care (Noddings, 1984) to respond to teachers’ most pressing needs. We report on the coupling patterns that emerged in the data analysis and provide implications for practice and research.