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4 strategies for building leadership communities: ONLINE EXCLUSIVE
By Bryan A. VanGronigen, Meredith L. Wronowski and Wesley L.C. Henry
October 2025
A school can be an isolating workplace. Teachers often close their classroom doors, school leaders may be stuck in their offices, and district leaders frequently work in completely separate buildings. Communities that facilitate belonging for teachers and leaders provide a host of benefits, including increased job satisfaction, reduced burnout, reduced absenteeism, and reduced turnover (Fang et al., 2025), but community and belonging in schools can be diminished by a lack of time for collaboration in the workday, hierarchical leadership, and bureaucratic norms. Although there has been an increasing focus on strategies to create supportive school communities for students (Allen et al., 2021), the time and effort devoted to creating supportive school communities for teachers and leaders has not always been a priority. School leaders are
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References
Allen, K.-A., Slaten, C.D., Arslan, G., Roffey, S., Craig, H., & Vella-Brodrick, D.A. (2021). School belonging: The importance of student and teacher relationships. In M.L. Kern & M.L. Wehmeyer (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of positive education (pp. 525-550). Palgrave Macmillan.
Bryk, A.S., Gomez, L.M., Grunow, A., and LeMahieu, P.G. (2015). Learning to improve: How America’s schools can get better at getting better. Harvard Education Press.
Fang, Y., Yu, J., Toyama, H., & Salmela-Aro, K. (2025). School principals’ job burnout and job satisfaction in Finland: The impact of work-family conflict, role conflict, and sense of community. Educational Management Administration & Leadership.
Harris, A., Jones, M., Ismail, N., & Nguyen, D. (2019). Middle leaders and middle leadership in schools: Exploring the knowledge base (2003–2017). School Leadership & Management, 39(3-4), 255-277.
Mahfouz, J. (2018). Principals and stress: Few coping strategies for abundant stressors. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 48(3), 440-458.
Meyers, C.V. & VanGronigen, B.A. (2021). The best-laid plans can succeed. Educational Leadership, 78(7), 50-55.
Payne, C. & Kaba, M. (2007). So much reform, so little change: Building-level obstacles to urban school reform. Social Policy, 37(3/4), 30-37.
Wronowski, M.L., VanGronigen, B.A., Henry, W., & Olive, J.L. (2022). Critical community focus in school improvement plans: The absent imperative. The School Community Journal, 32(2), 139-176.
Dr. Bryan A. VanGronigen is an associate professor of education specializing in educational leadership in the School of Education at the University of Delaware. His overarching research focus is on organizational resilience and change management in K-12 schools with specific interest areas in school improvement efforts, educational leader professional development, and educational policy analyses. Prior to becoming a university faculty member, Dr. VanGronigen was a middle school and high school social studies teacher, a department chair, and a schoolwide leadership team member.
Meredith Wronowski is an Associate Professor in the Educational Administration Department at the University of Dayton. She has more than 14 years of PK-12 practitioner experience as an urban school teacher, instructional coach, and principal. Her research is focused on improving equity in under-resourced communities and schools, specifically, teacher recruitment and retention in urban schools and districts, the unintended impacts of accountability policy on the teaching profession, and the ways in which schools increase or diminish students’ opportunity to learn.
Wesley Henry, Ph.D. is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Educational & Literacy Leadership at Sacred Heart University. As a former teacher, teacher leader, and university administrator, Wesley’s research interests are rooted in better understanding educational leader preparation, the role professional learning plays in setting organizational dynamics within educational settings, and the democratization of school leadership with a particular focus on teacher leadership and partnerships between teacher leaders and administrators.
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