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This article explores how ethics education has evolved over the last 15 years in graduate schools of educational leadership. A review of previous studies showing an increased attention to ethics education is analyzed in the context of external pressures such as new NCATE standards, and the emerging role of moral psychology to inform how ethics is taught in other pre-professional college programs.

The purpose of this study is to investigate mentorship practices during the COVID-19 pandemic and to consider how mentorship could be improved to support students of educational leadership (EDLE) during crises.

Participants in this collective self-study were four faculty members (i.e. the authors) within an EDLE program in one public, research-intensive university in the southern USA. Data sources were memos, email correspondence, reflective dialogue, course evaluations and meeting notes. Analysis involved dialogic engagement among the research team to identify emergent themes.

Analysis revealed five themes that reflect our collective experiences as mentors during the pandemic. These themes were challenges created by dismantled systems; meeting students' needs for understanding, flexibility and meaningful learning experiences; evolving personal–professional boundaries; grappling with our own sense-making and well-beingness; and clarifying values and priorities.

The pandemic exemplifies the need for a deeper conceptualization of mentorship that stimulates more intimate, compassionate relationships between mentors and mentees. When mentorship is grounded in compassion, intimacy and mutual vulnerability, it demonstrates a genuine ethic of care and concern for others that is supportive of well-being and serves as a model for mentees entering the profession.

This paper extends disciplinary knowledge by focusing on the mentorship of EDLE students during crises and provides insights on how mentorship could be enacted to mutually support mentor–mentee well-being.

The purpose of this study was to explore the well-being of school principals and the job-embedded demands responsible for challenging their adoption of healthy self-care practices.

Drawing upon a multidisciplinary theoretical framework that included contributions from the fields of neurobiology and psychology, three tiers of self-care needs were established to inform the study: basic physiological needs such as sleep, hydration, and nutrition; active self-care practices such as exercise, relaxation, and stress relief; and higher order needs such as belongingness and love addressed through work-life balance, volunteerism, and relational belonging. A 45-question survey containing Likert scale items and open-ended questions was returned from 473 practicing building administrators (a 24.4% response rate).

Findings from this study, compared to estimates from the literature, indicate that school leaders work longer hours, are more sleep deprived, more dehydrated, have poorer diet practices, exercise less regularly, and spend less time with their friends and family than the general population. Administrators struggled to find ways within their control to improve their self-care behavior and offered suggestions regarding how the structure of the job itself might be changed to facilitate improving the health of school leaders.

This work offers insight into the current well-being of school principals, and by better understanding administrators’ self-care practices, this study can inform the field in developing supports, practices, and expectations, which promote the health and well-being of building-level leaders. Unhealthy self-care practices may influence their effectiveness, happiness, and possibly their longevity within the profession. Data collected through this study informed ideas about policies and procedures that could promote greater opportunities for healthier, more effective leaders within schools.

The purpose of this paper is to identify how current administrative interns enrolled in a university administrator preparation program describe and make meaning of their internship experiences.

For this qualitative study, the researchers interviewed administrative interns enrolled in one university preparation program throughout their internship regarding the experiences.

The findings from this study contribute and add value to research in the area of administrator preparation by highlighting the experiences of administrative interns as well as the implications of how interns make meaning of those experiences using a developmental concerns framework. Key factors influencing those perceptions cited by interns as a result of their internship experiences include the interns’ readiness to take on leadership positions, their change in perception of administration, perceptions of journal reflections as an internship component, supporting teachers, receiving feedback from others, and the level of support provided by their internship supervisor.

The findings from this study contribute to research in the area of administrator preparation at the university level, specifically pertaining to the structure of the internship, how university preparation programs can respond to interns’ concerns, and the design and emphasis of practicum experiences within those degree or certificate programs.

In response to the proliferation of neoliberal reforms and a “new professionalism” (Evetts, 2009, 2011), researchers argue that school leaders, like teachers, have experienced a form of “de-professionalization” (Keddie, 2017) and that the principalship may even be an “emergent profession” (Stone-Johnson and Weiner, 2020). Such framing assumes school leaders are indeed part of a profession. And yet, while research abounds regarding teaching as a profession (Ingersoll and Collins, 2018; Sachs, 2016; Torres and Weiner, 2018), no parallel literature exists about school leaders. Such information is critical to ensure educators receive the appropriate professional development and support (Sachs, 2016) and move the field forward and thus motivated the authors to ask how principals view their work and whether it can be seen as part of a discrete profession.

The authors utilized an interpretative phenomenological approach (IPA) drawing on qualitative interviews with sixteen elementary school principals in two US states.

The authors find administration, and specifically the principalship, exists adjacent to, but distinct from, teaching. Additionally, the authors find school leadership is an “emergent” profession, with aspects of the work that indicate leadership is a profession but others that do not.

This study extends early work (Stone-Johnson and Weiner, 2020) on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on principals' professionalism to shed light on the larger and more long-standing features of principals' work that support and hinder its development as a profession and the implications of such designation on attracting and retaining school leaders, as well as underscoring that because school leadership and teaching can be considered discrete professions, teachers need not leave their classroom to be true professionals.

Contemporary urban and regional planning practice and scholarship often fails to address the full implications of technological change (technology blindness), lacks a clear or consistent definition of the long term (temporal imprecision) and seldom uses formal foresight methodologies. Discussion in the literature of time horizons beyond 10 years is, therefore, based on profoundly unrealistic assumptions about the future. The paper aims to discuss why conventional reasoning about possible futures is problematic, how consideration of long-term timescales is informal and inconsistent and why accelerating technological change requires that planners rethink basic assumptions about the future from 2030s onward.

The author reviews 1,287 articles published between January 2010 and December 2014 in three emblematic urban and regional planning journals using directed content analysis of key phrases pertaining to long-term planning, futures studies and self-driving cars.

The author finds that there is no evidence of consistent usage of the phrase long term, that timeframes are defined in fewer than 10 per cent of articles and that self-driving cars and related phrases occur nowhere in the text, even though this technology is likely to radically transform urban transportation and form starting in the early 2020s. Despite its importance, discussion of disruptive technological change in the urban and regional planning literature is extremely limited.

To make more realistic projections of the future from the late 2020s onward, planning practitioners and scholars should: attend more closely to the academic and public technology discourses; specify explicit timeframes in any discussion or analysis of the future; and incorporate methods from futures studies such as foresight approaches into long-term planning.

This paper identifies accelerating technological change as a major conceptual gap in the urban and regional planning literature and calls for practitioners and scholars to rethink their foundational assumptions about the long-term and possible, probable and preferable futures accordingly.