Ethics education in leadership development: Adopting multiple ethical paradigms

Attitude development and identity formation in educational leadership are the goals of non-traditional, and in the 21st century also of neo-traditional, development initiatives. Ethics education emerges as one of the linchpins in neo-traditional and non-traditional development initiatives. Yet, despite considerable interest in ethics education in educational leadership development, ethics education has not been examined systematically, and empirical research on its effects is scarce. The present paper aims to address this lacuna by exploring the effects of ethics education based on extended multiple ethical paradigms in the context of an educational leadership programme. Moreover, the study follows a systematic longitudinal design, based on pre- and post-course measurements that used the Ethical Perspectives Instrument in six Israeli cohorts of educational administration graduate students (n = 73). The findings indicate that ethics education has a limited effect on the student body as a whole, but when students were separated into those who did and did not change their dominant ethics, differences emerged. The results suggest that school leadership development focusing on attitude development and identity formation in general and on ethics education in particular lead to different outcomes.