- The Ontario Leadership Framework and the Catholic Leadership Framework both describes successful individual and small group practices for school leaders. The OLF also includes personal leadership resources including cognitive, social, and psychological resources. The frameworks provide leaders with a clear picture of what effective leadership looks like. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed education in a number of ways. It has heightened the importance of positive mental health, as well as physical wellbeing. In my opinion, the personal resources from the OLF that have been most important for school leaders during the pandemic are the psychological resources that leaders require to support students, parents, and staff through fear and illness. They are optimism, self-efficacy, resilience, and proactivity. I believe that self-efficacy and resilience are the personal resources that have served me as a principal the most. Supporting a school community through the pandemic has meant persevering in the face of challenge, and being able to adapt quickly to change. This has allowed me to effectively manage change under very complex circumstances. The pandemic has changed how we learn, the school setting, and how we connect with one another. It has changed our schedules, our pastimes, our social lives, our home and work lives. It has created terrific uncertainty, anxiety, and fear. Whereas before the pandemic, many principals relied upon the cognitive, personal resources, including expertise and problem analysis, and shared solution finding. We now find ourselves making decisions in isolation without prior experience and with very little direction. In this shifting environment, it is increasingly important for us to believe in our own ability to perform a task or achieve a goal. We also need to see and act upon potential within challenging situations, and support our staff, students, and parents who are taking responsible risks in very difficult circumstances. The educational landscape has been constantly changing. Educators have had to adapt to new protocols for in-person learning. They also had to pivot quickly to online learning, and many have had to manage both students online and at school. Students and parents have been adapting to new rules, economic hardship, loss, illness, isolation, and fear. The personal resource that I believe will be most important in post-pandemic school leadership is the psychological resource of self-efficacy, include cultivating self and collective efficacy. As school leaders, we will need to believe in our ability to perform a task or achieve a goal, take responsible risks, and persevere in the face of challenges. We will also need to nurture collective efficacy. We need to nurture our community through discouragement, and seek to achieve a better future for our students through combined actions. We also need to nurture staying power when collective efforts, either did produce quick results or meet powerful resistance. We will need to be resilient and we will need to nurture resilience in our community. Emotion regulation. That's the ability to stay calm under pressure. Impulse control. This helps us to tolerate ambiguity and make thoughtful decisions. Optimism. Optimism balanced with realism gives us hope for the future and control over the direction in our lives. Causal analysis. Causal analysis is our ability to identify the actual causes of our problems, and to assess them accurately. And most importantly, empathy. Empathy represents our ability to read other people's cues, and to understand the psychological and emotional states.