Evidence of Growth in Wise Leadership: Findings of an Executive Education Program For School Leaders

Our research explores preliminary findings of growth in wise leadership across school leaders who participated in the Practical Wisdom for Agile Leadership: Formative Education’s Core DNA (PWAL). An initial 2023 cohort of four leadership teams represented seven schools serving over 3,500 students, including public and private, rural, urban, and suburban demographics in Florida, Texas, Alabama, Wisconsin, and California, and the following 2024 cohort was comprised of six leadership teams that represented five rural schools and one university serving over 4,500 students in the Black Belt region of Alabama and Mississippi.

School leaders globally confront myriad challenges: post-Covid learning and social-emotional needs of students, increased burnout and turnover in staff, and the competing demands of stakeholders (Global Report on Teachers Addressing Teacher Shortages and Transforming the Profession, 2024). Now more than ever, school leaders need agility and a compass to navigate a complex educational landscape. One of the virtues most vital for school leadership is Aristotle’s phronesis and collective phronesis, that practical wisdom crucial to ethical judgment and decision-making especially when two or more goods come into conflict. It is crucial for school leaders to understand not only what phronesis is and why it matters but how it is developed and applied in the context of their work.

Kristjáansson et al. (Darnell 2019, 2022) propose a conceptual four-component model based on the functions of phronesis as constitutive (moral sensitivity), integrative (moral adjudication), invoking a blueprint of the good life (moral identity) and overseeing emotion regulation (moral emotion). While Kristjansson et al. articulate the conceptual model and its four functions, Bohlin offers a formative framework that activates these four components for leaders as they confront day-to-day challenges. 

The Practical Wisdom Framework (PWF)™ is a relational and dialogical intervention particularly conducive to activatingcollective phronesis, as it engages all team members and helps them to deliberate collaboratively (Bohlin 2022). PWALis an executive education program designed to provide school leadership teams with the structured time and space within their workday to practice using the PWF™ and in doing so develop shared habits, shared language and a shared approach to problem solving that is intentionally formative. By incorporating both conceptual knowledge and experiential learning activities that teach the PWF™, participants acquire a practically wise approach to shared deliberation and decision-making.

Using a mixed methods approach with quantitative and qualitative data collections, we explored the use of the PWF™ across two cohorts of school leaders participating in PWAL independently. A pre- and post-test study design was used to evaluate PWAL. Descriptive statistics, a paired sample t-test, and effect size were calculated for situated wise reasoning scores (Brienza 2018) and a Wilcoxon signed-rank test conducted for total and domain-specific Flourishing Index scores (VanderWeele, 2017). A thematic analysis of the open-ended questions identified recurring themes and patterns in participant responses.

Our findings suggest that by engaging repeatedly with the PWF™ participants activated their capacity to take practical wise action, as well as increase their professional and personal flourishing through a greater sense of meaning and purpose. These findings warrant a larger study to evaluate the effectiveness of the program’s use of the PWF™ as a scaffolded leadership tool to promote collective phronesis and flourishing within formative school communities.

Speaker: Soledad Hersey (Postdoctoral Fellow, Human Flourishing Program del IQS, Institute for Quantitive Social Science)

Sponsors: Institute for Quantitive Social Science; RCCHU; Harvard University