Educational Changes and Crisis Management

Abstract

This paper provides an insight into the results of a large-scale mixed-methods research series on educational change over a decade, the last phase of which coincided with the coronavirus epidemic, which provided an opportunity to analyse emergency changes. An important question was how to adapt to the changed environment using innovative research methods and what correlations can be assumed between school characteristics before the epidemic and responses to the crisis. The focus of this paper is accordingly twofold: it addresses both the issue of temporary and longer-term changes in research methods and dilemmas that address the relationship between crisis responses that lead to sustained school-level development and organizational conditions, leadership strategies, developmental knowledge and prior pedagogical practices. Building on the latter, our paper presents a model developed by the authors that describes the relationship between organisational behaviour and crisis responses, illustrated by case studies.