Chapter 3: Grenadian School Principals in Their Middle Years Leading (Through) the Lean Years

This book chapter draws on observations and interviews with mid-career school principals in Grenada to explore how these leaders navigate the distinctive climate of school leadership in this Caribbean territory. Grenada’s colonial legacy and attendant socio-historical, cultural, political, and geo-economic challenges undergird this exploration. The focus of the chapter is on three elementary and secondary public school principals with 6 to 18 years of experience as school administrators and the strategies they employed as mid-career school leaders in leading student learning and building sustainable leadership. Five such strategies are examined in the chapter: nurturing a servant-leader mindset, building leadership capacity, distilling priorities, engaging in self-help, and harnessing political savvy in navigating the pressures of work. The chapter emphasizes the need for ongoing professional learning and principal support for mid-career principals to build cognitive acumen of conditions that foster high student achievement and overall move towards a systems thinking approach to leading for sustainable school communities.