Practical Wisdom for Agile Leadership:

Formative Education’s Core DNA

an online executive education program for K-12 school teams

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APPLICATION FOR 2024-2025 Academic Year

If you are a K-12 school administrative team of 3 to 6 members, please complete the online application form by clicking the “Apply” button below.

Overview

Schools are formative institutions with noble aims and ambitions for their students, faculty/staff, and the families they serve. Yet, as school leaders we are faced with challenges that impact teaching, learning, and culture every day.  How do we adjudicate justice and mercy in specific cases? How do we shape practices, protocols, and policies that are formative rather than punitive or merely bureaucratic? In other words, how do we learn to stay agile and focus on what matters most?  How do we help our colleagues do the same?  Implicit in each of these challenges are formative opportunities, that is, opportunities to help ourselves and those we serve, to flourish. How we harness these moments and lead in ways that promote character, community, and flourishing is what this program is all about.

We believe what counts most as a leader committed to flourishing is to develop what Aristotle called phronesis, or practical wisdom.

We believe every leader has the capacity to grow in practical wisdom.

Practical Wisdom for Agile Leadership: Formative Education’s Core DNA, is an executive education program for teams of school administrators, who are eager to operationalize their commitment to educating for character and flourishing. In this program we help you and your team understand what practical wisdom is, why it is vital to character education, and how you can activate it in real time with the help of the Practical Wisdom Framework™ (PWF). The PWF is a proven approach to shared deliberation and decision-making that brings out the best in ourselves, our teams and the communities we serve.

Warmest regards,

Karen E. Bohlin, EdD Director

Program Design – Our Work Together as a Cohort

Over 4 interactive online workshops and 2 individual coaching sessions, we delve into the power of the Practical Wisdom Framework™ (PWF), a disciplined approach to shared decision-making that helps you to “know what to do when you don’t know what to do.” The Practical Wisdom Framework activates your best self and equips you and your team to navigate day to day challenges in ways that actually build character, community and flourishing. Each half-day workshop is comprised of three 50 minute interactive segments. You will have an opportunity to try and apply what you learned in your school setting, reflect on your practice and advance your team’s core work of building character, community and flourishing.  

Your team will work on a shared initiative or problem of practice and receive feedback and coaching along the way.

The program is designed to help you and your colleagues:

  • Understand what practical wisdom is, why it is crucial to leading for flourishing, and how you can grow as a team as you respond to problems each day.

  • Activate your leadership compass and the mindsets and skill sets that help you navigate with joy and purpose.

  • Tackle a problem of practice using the Practical Wisdom Framework™, a powerful, proven model for making decisions and solving problems in ways that leverage your formative value proposition.

  • Model, coach and teach practical wisdom and scale research based practices and protocols within your school community.

Who Should Participate

School teams with:

  • An explicitly formative mission, ie, a commitment to character education and the flourishing of students and members of the school community

  • A leader/principal with a minimum of 2 years experience

  • Teams of school-based K-12 leaders/school administrators, which may include any staff responsible for leading other adults and shaping student culture, ie, deans, division or grade level leaders, athletic directors, assistant principals

  • Teams of ideally 4 to 6 representatives per school.

To keep the cohort experience interactive and collaborative, we are creating an intentional Community of Practice and will cap the program at 5 to 6 schools with no more than 40 participants.

Taking Practical Wisdom for Agile Leadership as a Team

Completing this program as a K-12 school or organization-level team is a powerful way to model, coach and teach practical wisdom in your school community. You will have the opportunity to tackle a problem of practice with your own team and gain valuable feedback from colleagues in other schools.

Program Timeline and Schedule

November 2024 Session One Kickoff 

January 2024 to May 2025 Sessions Two through Four and Individual Coaching Sessions

November through early May (excluding December)

For More Information

Reach out to the Karen Bohlin at kbohlin@abigailadamsinstitute.org.

Meet the Lead Instructor,

Dr. Karen E. Bohlin

I began my career as a high school English teacher and saw first hand how students can be lit up when truly engaged with a text–particularly a good story. I also discovered what results from building an intentional community within and outside the classroom–students who care about and help to create a welcoming culture; teachers, who care about students as persons as much as they care about their performance; and parents who embrace their call as the first and most important educators of their children. Reflecting on these experiences and the variables that informed them, has shaped my trajectory in educational leadership.

Over the last twenty-five years, I have had the privilege of working with educators–teachers, parents, school leaders and policy makers nationally and internationally. And I am reminded every day that what inspires and keeps outstanding educators in schools is what drew them there in the first place: They care about young people and respect their dignity. They believe in the promise and potential of the next generation to shape our changing world for good. These educators bring joy, humor and perspective to ordinary life and its challenges. They engage even the youngest students in big questions and enduring wisdom and design learning experiences that give students practice developing the habits of mind, heart and will they need to flourish.

My scholarly work and publications explore the practitioner’s perspective. In particular, they emerge from three passions and their impact on student flourishing: character education as the schooling of desire; practical wisdom as the DNA of formative leadership; and the power of literature and the arts to awaken the moral imagination.

It was a joy for me to serve for 18 years as Head of Montrose School in the greater Boston area, a twice recognized National School of Character, and to harness the energy of talented faculty to help students thrive in learning, relationships and life. At Montrose I founded the LifeCompass Institute, a lab-school community of practice, where faculty design resources to engage students in their own character development and flourishing. 

Now I enjoy working with leaders across the globe who are eager to operationalize and scale their formative mission. We do this by equipping them with the Practical Wisdom Framework™ (PWF), an approach to decision-making that enables teams to navigate the challenges of each day with agility and intentionality. Using the PWF brings out the best in ourselves as leaders, our teachers and staff, and the students and families we serve, so we can flourish.

The Practical Wisdom Project is grateful to the Kern Family Foundation for their support of this Leadership Education Program.