“Are you Prepared to Defend the Decisions You've Made?” Reflective Equilibrium, Situational Appreciation, and the Legal and Moral Decisions of School Leaders

Abstract

This purpose of the study was to explore moral literacy and legal reasoning through educational leadership decision making. Participants in the study were students enrolled in a law and ethics course in an educational leadership graduate program. Each student drafted a personal code of ethics at the beginning of the course. Throughout the course, aspects of law, ethics and leadership were examined from a problem-based, case study approach offering students opportunities to examine school leadership decision making through legal and ethical lenses. At the end of the course, students wrote a reflection essay on the content studied, with a connection back to their personal codes and the relationship that those codes have to their legal knowledge, moral reasoning, and professional decision making in leadership. Respondents’ essays reflected each legal theme covered in the course, bringing ethical leadership to the study and practice of law. In addition, the essays illuminated ideas of reflective equilibrium and situational appreciation, both of which speak not only to the students’ personal codes of ethics but also to the approaches that the students bring to professional decision making. Educational leaders bring their personal ethics to the professional decisions they make and, as a result, to the defenses of those decisions. In the end, the questions asked and answered by the statutes, regulations, and cases covered in the course are not merely legal. They are also moral. And the issues raised speak not merely to legal compliance; they speak to leadership.