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The purpose of this paper is to examine first-year principals’ sense-making about two potentially conflicting demands as they take over low-performing urban schools: the demand to exert control over their teachers’ practice, and the need to build their teachers’ trust, collegiality, and commitment.

This study draws on a series of surveys and interviews with 12 first-year principals that took over some of the lowest-performing public schools in one large urban district.

Some principals begin their first year seeing their work to build accountability and commitment as complementary, while others see these two areas as in tension. Principals remain relatively consistent in these approaches over their first year on the job, although some principals change their views, generally coming to see these two areas as increasingly separate over time.

Future work should examine principals’ work to balance the demands of accountability and commitment in a variety of organizational contexts.

Principal preparation may benefit from training principals on the particular challenges they may face as they work with teachers in low-performing schools. Accountability systems may also seek to alter the demands placed on novice principals.

Despite the centrality of principals to school improvement, the prevalence of high-stakes school accountability, and findings on the importance of commitment to school success, little empirical research has examined how principals make sense of the potentially conflicting demands of accountability and commitment in highly pressured circumstances.

This paper aims to highlight how a group of novice principals in Connecticut and New York used relational, dispositional and situational factors to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. The study aims to support new principals and educational leaders.

Using Mutch's (2015) dispositional, relational and situational framework to guide the inquiry, this paper uses qualitative methods and interviewing in particular to explore the questions of interest. Six novice principals were each interviewed over the 2020–2021 school year, each interview lasting approximately forty-five minutes. Data were analyzed thematically using both deductive coding techniques and cross comparative analysis.

Findings show that novice principals tended to rely on dispositional factors to respond to the crisis. Additionally, novice principals reported limited responses to the situational factors of the crisis due to restricted access and guidance from the district leadership.

Due to the small sample size and methodological approach, it may be inappropriate to generalize the findings across all novice principals in all settings. Further research in additional settings and larger samples are encouraged to support the proposed findings.

This paper has several implications for districts and leadership preparation programs. Among these is the need for leadership preparation programs to adjust their curricula to train new principals properly.

This work fills a gap in the research regarding how new principals respond to a crisis. It also provides insights into practice and possible means to enhance the growing population of new principals entering the educational leadership workforce.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the factors and conditions that help to explain what it takes to mount district-wide efforts to improve instruction and address inequities.

The authors examined the evolution of administrator social networks related to instruction, equity and race in three districts over a three-year period. The authors documented when and how these social networks support district-wide connections and consider the relationship between network evolution and each district’s efforts to improve outcomes for all students.

The authors found that administrators were most likely to be talking together about instruction, equity and race, and administrator social networks were most conducive to the sharing of information across roles, levels and initiatives when explicit efforts were made to engage administrators in common equity-related initiatives and when discussions of equity and race were part of the public conversation.

Future studies of social networks among teachers and among teachers and administrators would provide a more well-rounded picture of how information and resources related to instruction, equity and race are shared throughout a district.

Results from this study can be used to help administrators reflect on key aspects of their organizational structure and the opportunities for interaction they provide.

Strategic connections among those in different roles and initiatives can foster sharing of different perspectives and support the development of community cohesion and a common understanding of joint work.

This study provides an initial step in bringing together work on social networks and instructional leadership with research related to equity and race in studies of school improvement.