Chapter 10: Thrive: A Guiding Model for Facilitating School Leader Well-Being

Those who invest in educational leadership through practice, research, or policy understand that schools need to be places where students not only learn, but also flourish and thrive. The school environment can serve as a replenishing system that connects and grows the lives and minds of the young people who enter and engage within it. This aspiration is at the heart of school leadership, and it is the collective and individual responsibility of educational leaders to direct their efforts towards such a result, as called for in our Professional Standards for Educational Leaders (Murphy, 2016). This level of student success and well-being is achievable, but as leaders work to ensure that the needs of others are met, attending to their own self-care and well-being is essential.