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This narrative inquiry centers on teachers' longitudinal experiences of policy-related reforms systematically introduced to T. P. Yaeger Middle School, a campus located in the fourth largest, second most diverse city in America. The embedded research study, with roots tracing back to 1997, uses five interpretive tools to capture six mandated changes in the form of a story serial. Special research attention is afforded pay-for-performance, the sixth reform in the series. The deeply lived consequence of receiving bonuses for his teaching performance prompted Daryl Wilson, Yaeger's long-term literacy department chair, to proclaim “data is [G]od.” Wilson's emergent, inventive metaphor aptly portrays the perplexing conditions under which his career ended, and how my long-term research project likewise concluded.

Teacher burnout is a persistent challenge for school principals, complicated by the lack of a proven, repeatable strategy to mitigate burnout. If left unresolved, burnout can adversely affect school culture and student learning, leading to turnover that can compound these harmful effects. Since burnout can vary in severity and frequency, principals can work to mitigate burnout in the moment, seizing the opportunity when burnout is first observed. In this narrative sketch, I provide an overview of my experiences in my development as a principal and how this informed my approach to supporting teachers. I also discuss my experiences as principal in working with teachers at different stages of burnout severity, sharing specific stories and reflecting on both the successes and failures of my efforts, including the use of chocolates and tissues to create an individualized safe space to initiate open dialogue. The title, “Chocolates or Tissues,” is a metaphor that represents my momentary burnout mitigation strategy but may also serve as a metaphor for the need for principals to seek individualized opportunities for resolution in a burnout moment when working with teachers.

Several factors and forces in school-level leaders' work can heighten emotions and incite emotionally charged situations. Challenges that heighten school-level leaders' emotions are related to systemic factors, people factors and personal factors. The extent to which each of these different factors influence the emotional experiences of school-level leaders, and whether that influence ends up being positive, negative or neutral, is contextual in nature. The systemic factors include encountering barriers when advocating for students, managing an intensified and expanding workload, working within disorienting policy contexts, and receiving a lack of support from their employer. Changes in school-level leaders' work and workload due to the COVID-19 pandemic that heightened emotions and emotional labour are also considered when discussing the systemic factors. People factors evident in the literature include workplace conflict, gendered power relations and crises and tragedies in the school community. The emotional labour inherent in school-level leadership comes to the forefront when considering the impact of these people factors on emotions at work because school-level leaders are tasked with making decisions that can have an immense impact on peoples' lives. Personal factors discussed in this chapter surround a school-level leader's individual emotional intelligence abilities and media attention directed towards them.

This chapter reports on findings from a wider research project undertaken in Portugal. It focuses on the views of school principals with respect to (new) policy on the school curriculum. School principals have to balance conflicting goals and to manage tensions of implementation, particularly in a context of intense school reform. As policy gatekeepers and interpreters, school leaders have a pivotal role to play in how policies are framed, managed, and discussed in the context of their schools. Data presented in this text are drawn from a wider 3-year study. Findings point to the existence of contradictory elements in the principals' accounts. In general, they are critical of the new curriculum policy and question the adequacy of the conditions currently existing in schools to put it into operation. Overall, the regulatory and centralized orientation stands in sharp contrast to the very essence of the policies that call for local, contextualized, and innovative solutions. Such findings need to be analyzed within a centralized and bureaucratic education system in which a logic of control and standardized management of education still dominates.

In this chapter, I propose a model for how school-level leaders manage their emotions. This model consists of six components. School-level leaders typically have little direct influence over the first component of the model, which are the socio-contextual factors in the schools, school communities and jurisdictions in which they work. A school-level leader's identity, sense of self and their personal characteristics comprise the second component of the model. The third component of the model is a multi-directional arrow demonstrating connections and interactions between the socio-contextual factors and a school-level leader's sense of self. Factors that heighten school-level leaders' emotional experiences in schools are considered as part of the fourth component of this model for school-level leaders' emotional regulation. The fifth component are the emotional regulation strategies school-level leaders use to manage emotions that emerge as part of their workday, while influence of supports and professional learning are considered as part of the sixth component, Finally, the model also accounts for the chain reactions and feedback loops that can occur when an individual utilizes an emotional regulation strategy that is unsuccessful. Those processes produce new emotions that must be regulated using similar, or different, emotional regulation strategy(ies).