Date of Award

December 2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education (EdD)

Department

Educational Leadership

First Advisor

Donna Pearson

Abstract

Education has historically been recognized as a stressful profession, yet the Covid-19 pandemic (2020) paired with intensified socio-political influences have exacerbated educator stress, anxiety, and negativity, prematurely pushing more career educators to leave the profession. Teacher and principal pre-service preparation programs largely neglect to train educators in strategies for personally managing negative stressors, and negativity mitigation strategies are often overlooked as a critical facet of school climate and culture. Therefore, the purpose of this dissertation in practice was to examine the degree to which a school administrator training series could stimulate personal and systemic positivity within participants’ schools in a broad effort to address educator stress, negativity, and burnout.A quantitative methodology was used to measure perceived growth in understanding and learned strategies for improving school climate by school administrators who participated in a positivity-based training program. The four-session training series was designed to provide administrators with leadership-based mindsets and tactics aimed at interrupting both personal and school-wide stress and negativity to improve school climate. Training modules included personal and organizational positivity-centered theory and practice from the field. Results captured through pre- and post- training perception surveys showed a significant improvement in newly acquired administrator knowledge and skills around positive leadership and organizational practices for participants attending all training sessions (n = 4). Growth perception was higher for knowledge-based learning on average as compared to perceived growth in application-based strategies. Study limitations included an inability of several participants to attend all training sessions due to unanticipated workplace demands, which impacted data validity and projected transferability from this study to other institutions. A need remains to further study how training administrators and teachers in positivity-based strategies may strategically prevent educator stress and burnout and improve school climate.

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