Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic spread rapidly across the globe, and many schools struggled to react quickly and adequately. Schools were one of the most important societal institutions affected by the pandemic and subsequent lockdown, with most school leaders being caught unprepared despite warnings of a rapidly advancing Fourth Industrial Revolution world. Some schools came to an abrupt halt since school leaders neither had little to no training in crisis leadership, nor had they dealt with a crisis of this scale and magnitude before. The response to the crisis required highly agile leaders who could learn quickly, support and include others, network, and respond to challenges and uncertainty with emotional stability. As a pandemic leader, I, too, was caught up in the chaos of how to make schools work and salvage learning in one of the most challenging times in the history of education. Therefore, I embarked on this self-study to engage both in a reflexive process alone and in a community with two critical friends so that I could more deeply engage with the phenomenon of learning agility in the capacity of being a school leader during the pandemic. The study is framed in a phenomenological paradigm using a postmodernistic research methodology. The self-study method used the qualitative research instruments of the Gibbs reflective cycle, anecdotal observations, and engagements with critical friends to make meaning of learning agility as a phenomenon. As a postmodern researcher taking a reflective and analytical stance, a corpus of data was collated, analysed, and themed. The main findings showed that support, empowerment, emotional stability, collaboration, and networking emerged as predictable themes. Emotional stability was the most unexpected together with the paradoxical relationship between agility and stability, which should provide an environment that supports measured risk-taking. In addition, the usual learning-agile enablers emerged amidst a few enablers that have not been highlighted in the literature, thereby making this study’s contribution significant. One such finding is disruption as an enabler that surfaced due to the pandemic. Another critical finding was the various disablers of learning agility that need more intense scrutiny as they offer pathways to creating an agile learning environment. Keywords: Learning agility, Adaptive leadership, Collaborative leadership, Pandemic leadership.