Online Leadership Education Program
How would the world be different if leaders leveraged every crisis as an opportunity to improve individual and collective flourishing, as well as performance?
How would the world be different if they leveraged every decision as an opportunity to build culture, character and the common good?
What We Believe
We believe that what counts most as a leader committed to building formative and flourishing institutions is to develop practical wisdom.
Practical wisdom, what Aristotle called “good sense,” is the disposition to perceive and deliberate well in context, to aim at what matters most and adjudicate competing goods, so we can take the right actions, at the right time, for the right reasons, and help others to do the same.
We believe that every leader has the capacity to grow in practical wisdom.
What We Do
The Practical Wisdom Project at AAI explores questions at the heart of leadership for flourishing:
What do ancient wisdom and contemporary research reveal about the power of phronesis in human flourishing?
How can we harness its power to create and sustain formative institutions that serve the greater good?
How do leaders learn to make mission-aligned strategic decisions–and empower others to do the same–from day to day operations to crisis management?
How do leaders invest in people in ways that support both human flourishing and high performance?
The Practical Wisdom Project at AAI serves as the center for the development of Dr. Karen Bohlin’s creative work in leadership education drawing on the theory and application of the Practical Wisdom Framework.™
Our Partners Include:
To learn more, see
Journal of Education: The Practical Wisdom Framework: A Compass for School Leaders (Bohlin 2021)
The Practical Wisdom Project also hosts seminars on:
Courageous Dialogue: Practical Wisdom for Navigating Difficult Conversations
Learning from Mistakes: Practical Wisdom for Mentors & Young Professionals
The Schooling of Desire: Practical Wisdom from Philosophy, Art & Film
Who We Are
Karen Bohlin, EdD is Director of the Practical Wisdom Project at the Abigail Adams Institute and Research Affiliate at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science.
With three decades of leadership experience in both secondary and higher education, Dr. Bohlin is an internationally recognized thought leader in character education and applied virtue ethics.
Author and co-author of numerous publications including the bestseller Building Character in Schools (Jossey-Bass 1999); Teaching Character Education Through Literature: Awakening the Moral Imagination (Routledge 2005)/Educando el Carácter a Través de la Literatura (2020); Happiness and Virtue: Beyond East and West: Toward a New Global Responsibility (Tuttle 2012); Citizenship and Higher Education (Routledge, 2005); and the downloadable resources Stress Tests of Character; The Courageous Dialogue Toolkit: Practical Wisdom for School Leaders (2021), her most recent publication is the chapter "Educating the Heart: Why Poetry Matters” in Educating for Character Through the Arts (Routledge, 2023).
Prior to her work here, Dr. Bohlin served as head of the Montrose School in Medfield, MA, where she founded the LifeCompass Institute for Character & Leadership, secured and developed its permanent campus, doubled enrollment and established the school's international reputation as a flagship institution with vibrant student, faculty, parent and alumnae engagement.
Dr. Bohlin began her career as a middle and high school English teacher, drama director and cross country coach. She earned her doctorate in education and was appointed Assistant Professor of Education and Director of the Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character at Boston University. The first ethics center in the country to focus on the education of teachers and school leaders, here, she led professional development programs for thousands of educators, consulted with state departments and ministries of education, and helped to shape policy and programs worldwide. Co-architect of the National Schools of Character Program, she also co-led pioneering research on character education and teacher preparation in higher education.
While Head of Montrose School, she remained a Senior Scholar at Boston University’s Character and Social Responsibility (CCSR) and co-founded in 2018 the Kern Partners in Character and Educational Leadership (KPCEL), a consortium of over 30 institutes in both higher education and K-12 schools.
A highly sought-after speaker and consultant , Dr. Bohlin currently leads the executive education program Practical Wisdom for Agile Leadership (PWAL) and provides onsite professional development and Communities of Practice for schools, universities, and parent organizations, equipping educators with the mindset and skillset they need to shape institutions committed to flourishing.
A guest on numerous podcasts, including National Public Radio's Merrow Report and CBS's Early Show, Dr. Bohlin has also been interviewed for Parents Magazine, US News and World Report, Reader's Digest, New York Times, Boston Globe, Newsweek, and Ladies Home Journal.
Manee Ngozi Nnamani is a Computer Scientist by profession who discovered her true passion in education. She is a dedicated advocate for character and virtue education, leveraging technology to empower young individuals and support families, educators, and institutional leaders. She completed a Master's degree in Learning Design, Innovation, and Technology at Harvard University, and she now focuses on creating and implementing character education programs that promote flourishing in schools.
As a Researcher at the Practical Wisdom Project, Manee conducted the impact assessments for the Practical Wisdom for Agile Leadership (PWAL) Executive Education program. She plays a crucial role in the leadership team of the Lagoon School in Nigeria, passionately promoting virtue-based leadership education for educators and students.
Additionally, as a Researcher at the Teaching Systems Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she contributes insights on promoting equity and flourishing in Computer Education for Massachusetts schools. She facilitates monthly workshops for cross-functional educators aimed at promoting collaboration among Administrators, Counselors, and Teachers to help Computer Science learners thrive.
Manee is part of the Practical Wisdom Project global team mapping out strategies for designing, piloting, and subsequently running the PWAL program in African countries.
Maria Soledad Hershey is a John and Daria Barry postdoctoral fellow at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University. She is interested in understanding and optimizing societal well-being and health through lifestyle habits rooted in societal and individual principles.
Dr. Hershey is designing a school-based intervention study using the theoretically grounded leadership intervention, the Practical Wisdom Framework™, aimed at understanding the efficacy of character and virtue education on the underlying sociocultural determinants of lifestyle behaviors. This study aims to bridge the gap between theory and practice with a holistic and interdisciplinary vision for promoting flourishing societies.
She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Navarra, Spain, in Nutritional Epidemiology, where she studied the associations between Mediterranean lifestyle factors on chronic disease health outcomes. She recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.
Miroslava Duranková is a co-founder and director of the Great Works Academy - a program dedicated to promoting character development of students and their teachers through a powerful pedagogical encounter with great stories and art. Designed to awaken young people’s desire for wisdom and beauty, students leave the program with a demonstrated commitment to pursue virtue in their own life.
Miroslava earned her Masters in Character Education from the University of Birmingham (UK) and completed a mixed methods thesis on The importance of moral imagination and desire in character education. She leads professional development initiatives and collaborates with experts in the field of character education worldwide, including the United States, Spain, UK, and Slovakia.
She has been a part of the Practical Wisdom Project since 2022, when she served a Visiting Scholar at the Abigail Adams Institute and researched the impact of the Practical Wisdom Framework at Montrose School, .
Miroslava is currently developing a character education program, using the Practical Wisdom Framework™at the Citadela Elementary Schools- the first elementary schools in Slovakia rooted in principles of classical education.
Mark Pacheco is an Assistant Professor in Language & Literacy Education at the University of Florida. His most recent research focuses on ways that teachers can foster students’ character development within secondary classrooms. In particular, he examines how students of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds can cultivate virtue through meaningful engagements with literature.
Along with this, he has led research efforts with the Human Dignity Curriculum, and is currently conducting a design research study on virtue-based approaches to literacy instruction in the US and Canada.
With the Practical Wisdom Project, he is spearheading qualitative research efforts, examining school leaders’ experiences with practical wisdom in varied learning contexts.
He is a former high school English and ESL teacher, and received his PhD from Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. His work has been published in leading education journals, including Reading Research Quarterly, TESOL Quarterly, Journal of Literacy Research, and Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy.
The Practical Wisdom Project at AAI is grateful for support from the Kern Family Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.