This descriptive study explored the influence of a 6-month well-being intervention on the leadership–life balance of school administrators. After completing the program, 12 administrators participated in a semistructured interview focused on their administrative duties, experience in the program, and changes in health-related knowledge/skills and behaviors. Investigators conducted a thematic analysis of the interview transcripts. The inductive process of data analysis comprised sorting, categorizing, and connecting the data via coding the data texts. Overall, administrators were successful in making health-related behavior change due to accountability, social support, and use of a fitness tracker during the 6-month program. Administrators also experienced reduced stress due to these changes. Engagement in this program can help school administrators find a leadership–life balance.
BACKGROUND
A statewide 6‐month school administrator health and wellness program encouraged participants to use a fitness tracker to self‐monitor their physical activity and sleep patterns. The purpose of this study was to examine participants' experience in a school administrator health and wellness program and their perceptions of the impact on health‐related behaviors, including activity/movement, nutrition, and sleep.
METHODS
Each of the 45 participants completed a semi‐structured interview at three points in the program. Questions were designed to discern school administrators' perceptions of their ideal health and wellness balance at home and work.
RESULTS
School administrators reported new insights into their own well‐being, benefits of social supports in their personal wellness journey, an expanded understanding of their ideal health and wellness balance at home and work, and a stronger sense of serving as a role model who needs to take care of him/herself.
CONCLUSIONS
Although the program was helpful in establishing an ideal health and wellness balance at home and work for some school administrators, future programs should better emphasize nutrition and scaffold opportunities to maintain new habits following program completion.
The shortage of special education teachers is critical. One means used to increase the supply of available teachers is to issue an emergency license to teachers not fully certified in special education. This is a phenomenological study of four general education teachers practicing special education using an emergency license. Their experience is characterized around four themes-diminished control over their lives, teaching, but on the "outside," supportive relationships, and becoming "new" and or renewed. Universal themes of lived space, lived time, and lived human relationships provide the lens through which their experiences are interpreted.
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