School leaders face myriad challenges: handling angry parent emails, managing contentious meetings, and addressing bullying, before the school day even begins. Each situation requires nuanced thinking and judgment, not one-size-fits-all answers.
How do we help school leaders to move from reactive mode to practical, wise, and formative responses? Our project equips school leaders with the practices and dispositions to claim and leverage this formative space.
We view Practical Wisdom (PW) as the antidote to reactive decision-making: the disposition to press pause, deliberate, and respond well. PW enables leaders to attend to context, engage stakeholders meaningfully, and adjudicate competing priorities—turning challenges into opportunities to promote flourishing.
While practical wisdom remains largely the purview of philosophy and psychology, its application in school leadership is under examined. What does practical wisdom look like in this context? And how can it be developed?
We leverage a Research Practice Partnership to optimize Practical Wisdom for Agile Leadership 2.0 (PWAL) building on early success and drawing insights from 46 school leaders in our inaugural program. Our Research Practice Partnership (RPP) engages practitioners as equal partners in research and program design. Over the course of three years this RPP will form up to 75 School Leaders (PWAL Fellows), give rise to a dynamic model of professional development, PWAL 2.0, and a robust network of Fellows, who revitalize school leaders and shape a sustainable model.
This project aims to shape leaders in practical wisdom and culminates an empirically-based model, evidence-based tools, and an international network committed to educating for flourishing. Ultimately, we seek to revitalize school leadership, build the unity, trust, and relationships vital to the flourishing of school communities. In the process, we will generate pioneering research and inspire cross-sector replication.
