PLANNING TO CULTIVATE SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS ONLINE: LESSONS FROM FOUR JAMAICAN SCHOOL PRINCIPALS - research paper

Oct 15, 2026

Establishing social connections is crucial for delivering exceptional educational experiences in both in-person and online settings. Online teaching challenges school principals by reducing face-to-face interaction time, and the COVID-19 period further increases administrative workload, limiting available effort. This qualitative semi-structured one-on-one interview study examined how principals build online relationships with teachers and students, including their feelings, motivation, and knowledge acquisition. Findings show varied strategies, but student engagement was not intentionally tied to academic involvement, indicating training opportunities for more strategic use of social relationships.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages18

Reading Time45 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Online learning challenges for principals

Building social relationships as instructional leadership

Background and prior research

PLANNING TO CULTIVATE SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS ONLINE: LESSONS FROM FOUR JAMAICAN SCHOOL PRINCIPALS ANN-MARIE WILMOT The University of West Indies, Mona, Jamaica ABSTRACT Establishing social connections is crucial for providing exceptional educational experiences, whether in-person or online. However, online teaching presents challenges for principals as it limits their ability to interact with students face-to-face, resulting in less contact time. Additionally, the current COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the administrative demandson school principals, further reducing their available time. This study investigated how school principals develop social relationships with teachers and students online, their feelings about it, their motivation, and how they acquired this knowledge. Using a qualitative, semi-structured, oneon-one interview methodology, the research explored the central question: How and why do school principals develop social relationships with teachers and students online? The findings uncovered that school principals employ various strategies to foster online social bonds with teachers and students. However, while the strategies used with teachers primarily focused on administrative functions and emotional support, those used with students were not intentionally geared towards academic engagement. As such, this research concludes that an opportunity exists for Jamaican school principals to fully harness the power of social relationships to enhance their students'academic performance. Consequently, a recommendation is that principals be offered various training opportunities to become more strategic in leveraging social connections to enrich learning experiences. INTRODUCTION Undoubtedly, the pre-COVID-19 classroom context presented several avenues for social interactions between teachers and students and students and their peers (Kwaske & McLennan, n.d.) and for school principals to interact with their students. Unfortunately, this conventional interaction was severely disrupted after the World Health Organization (2020) affirmed COVID-19 as a pandemic. This occasioned large-scale crisis-response transport of universities, with online learning as the educational platform (Adedoyin & Soykan, 2023) . In Jamaica, universities and K-12 educational institutions were impacted by a similar large-scale shift from face-to-face teaching and learning to online. Online learning is a mode of remote education capturing any teachinglearning experiences with reliance on the Internet as the dominant purveyor of class exchanges and communication (Appana, 2008) . Given the inadequate preparation among teachers to utilise online pedagogies and of students to learn online, concerns still exist about whether online learning is a sub-standard instructional delivery modality (OECD, 2020) . Likewise, doubts exist about its suitability for principals to connect with their students. This is especially true in contexts like Jamaica, where the sophistry of technological integration in pedagogical interactions could be higher. Given teachers’consistent online contact with students, they can implement reconsidered approaches to develop these relationships, even if severely hampered. On the other hand, the online teaching modality limits principals’ contact time with students because of the inability to do walk-ins and meet students in offices or other spaces for physical interactions. This compromises their ability to develop social relationships with their students effectively. Educational Planning | Winter 2024 45 Vol. 31, No. 1 However, Kwaske and McLennan (n.d.) warned that educational stakeholders must treat social relationships more seriously in online learning environments. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (2020) advanced some benefits of support that seem to validate Kwaske and McLennan’s caution: Varying categories of support are confirmed to be helpful for the cultivation of optimistic

FAQs

What research question does the study focus on regarding online relationships?

How and why do school principals develop social relationships with teachers and students online.

What methods did the study use to investigate principals’ online relational practices?

A qualitative, semi-structured one-on-one interview methodology.

What did the findings suggest about how principals engage students online?

Strategies used with teachers emphasized administrative functions and emotional support, while strategies used with students were not intentionally designed to support academic engagement.

Oct 15, 2026

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