Leaders of Character: The USAFA Approach to Ethics Education and Leadership Development (original) (raw)
Related papers
Ethical Leadership in the Military: The Gap between Theory and Practice in Ethics Education
Military Ethics and Leadership, 2017
Leaders play pivotal roles in initiating and directing team actions in ethically challenging situations during military operations. This chapter 1 addresses how military leaders are being prepared to cope with such ethically challenging situations. Generally, ethical challenges require moral competence for actors to be able to come to morally sound decisions. In this chapter, we focus on the gap between leadership education in ethics and the translation of moral insights into actions in theatres of operations. We argue that the gap between education and practice is largely due to the neglect of psychological mechanisms in military training. Even when insights into psychological mechanisms are integrated into leadership courses, they remain mostly theoretical. The Armed Forces of the Netherlands are used as a case to illustrate these issues. We furthermore provide suggestions for ethics education that can stimulate moral competence in military leaders in the field as well as in the classroom.
Journal of character & leadership integration, 2024
Since 1894, Culver Academies has aimed to develop leaders of character. Rooted in the military academy and boarding school traditions, Culver has centered leadership development around central virtues and values. In 1986, recognizing the need to provide integrated, successive leadership learning experiences for students across 4 years, Culver instituted a standalone academic Department of Leadership Education. The Department of Leadership Education, housed in the Schrage Leadership Center, is unique among secondary boarding schools in offering four successive academic leadership education classroom experiences alongside Student Life curricula. Each year's curriculum is centered in a transformational leadership framework, utilizing evidence-based tools to guide students' leadership and character growth at each level. Ultimately, students' growth is assessed by faculty (and students themselves) according to core leadership and character competencies developed by the Academies. Continual improvement of the department is ensured through a comprehensive triennial review process. The aim of this article is to illustrate a successful, iterative character and leadership education experience in a 4-year secondary school context.
Military and Ethics: How are Ethical Leaders Produced?
CONTEMPORARY MILITARY CHALLENGES
Ethics is an important element of military professionalism, and a factor in military work and behaviour, especially during operations. Studies and surveys show that ethical military leaders are crucial in promoting ethical conduct within the armed forces. This article presents the work of the Science and Technology Organization’s research team on Factors Affecting Ethical Leadership, which focuses on the study of military ethics, ethical education and training, national practices of teaching ethics in the armed forces, the documentation of relevant ethical cases, and surveying the opinions of military personnel with regard to ethical military leadership.
Leadership & Character at the United States Air Force Academy
T he military has a distinctive national reputation for the competence and personal and professional character of its leaders. The vision and mission of the Air Force Academy substantively support sustaining this reputation by developing leaders of character prepared to lead the nation. To execute its mission, this Academy carefully combines the teaching of leadership and character with practice, and promotes a synergy between education and practice and the domains of leadership and character across a 47-month experience. This requires a deliberate effort across mission elements, with this joint effort serving identified institutional outcomes that require both strong character and leadership competencies. The processes involved in leadership and character development are described.
Military Leadership and Ethics
Handbook of Military Sciences, 2023
Leadership and ethics are habitually treated as related to separate spheres. It would be better, perhaps, if leadership and ethics were treated as belonging to a single domain. Ethics is an aspect of leadership and not a separate approach that exists alongside other approaches to leadership such as the trait approach, the situational approach, etc. This holds especially true for the military, one of the few organizations that can legitimately use violence. Today, most militaries opt for a character-based approach for the ethics education of their leaders and espouse leadership theories that want leaders to be strong and visionary. Both the role of character and leadership are increasingly questioned, however, on the basis that situational factors are more influential than leadership and character. A closer look suggests that an interactionist perspective, with leadership, character, and the situation interplaying, is more accurate. It is still good leadership that keeps soldiers from crossing the line between the lawful use of force and excessive violence.
Preparing Ethical Leaders: Overviewing Current Efforts and Analyzing Forces That Have Shaped Them
1993
This paper presents findings of a study that investigated efforts to address ethical issues in 42 University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA) institutions. Data were gathered through a survey that was mailed to the department chairs of administrator-education programs at 50 UCEA institutions. A total of 42 responded, a response rate of 84 percent. Overall, respondents recognized the relationship between ethical problems and school leadership, expressed an increasing interest in ethics and trends in scholarship and policy, and viewed educational administration as a fundamentally ethical endeavor. Responses regarding programs fell into four general categories: (1) little interest in the area of ethics; (2) incidental treatment of ethics; (3) conscious efforts to integrate ethics into the curriculum; and (4) courses focusing on ethics, values, and moral leadership. Over one-third of the institutions offered courses on ethics and several required such courses for fulfillment of a degree. The factors that have influenced the rising interest in ethical instruction demographic, political, organizational, and ideological changes-are discussed. Because many inside and outside the school community view school leadership as a moral endeavor and recognize the need to prepare prospective administrators to function as ethical practitioners, interest in this topic will continue to grow. (Contains 99 references.) (LMI)
Including Ethics in the Study of Educational Leadership
Journal of College and Character, 2006
This article offers reasons why ethics should be included within leadership preparation and suggestions for infusing it in leadership education classes. The authors argue that a framework of making ethical decisions, overviews of codes of conduct, and examinations of case studies of ethical and unethical behaviors become intentional components of leadership education curricula. __________________________________________________________________________________ here is vast agreement that ethics is at the heart of a moral society and should be the vision for schools of the 21 st century (
Moral education in the military: Optimal approach to teaching military ethics
Theoria, Beograd
This paper aims to explain the inadequacies of the traditional approach to moral education in the military and present an optimal approach to teaching military ethics. Author provides a short review of key notions, the subject, and the importance of military ethics in armed forces, followed by a short analysis of both traditional approaches - aspirational and functionalist - to teaching military ethics identifying their weaknesses. Author concludes that it is necessary to transcend the traditional approach and include both moral philosophy and character development in moral education in order to develop a military ethos based on solid ethical foundations. Finally, author offers a solution to the identified problem and proposes an optimal approach to military ethics education, which includes both basic formal education in moral philosophy and meaningful integration of ethics in various other classes and forms of military training, in order to develop the desired ethics-based military...
Ethics education in leadership development
Educational Management Administration & Leadership
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...