Animating flourishing in school leadership: The 4P Framework
Animating flourishing in school leadership: The 4P Framework
by: Dr. Sabre Cherkowski, Dr. Benjamin Kutsyuruba, Dr. Keith Walker
date: August 26, 2025
What would mean to understand leadership as a generative, life-giving practice? This question may seem trivial given the consistent findings about the profound toll of stress, burnout, and work intensification on Canadian principals and vice-principals (Pollock et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2018). We recognise and deeply appreciate the challenges and hardships that school leaders and educators are facing in these uncertain and volatile times. At the same time, we see opportunities to create conversational spaces about the improvement of wellbeing. Shifting the focus from a deficit lens to an appreciative lens opens our view to see the strengths, gifts, and potentials available in our living systems. Shifting our focus to what makes us feel well and alive fuels our human desires for purpose and meaning, along with our needs for connection, care, belonging and love.
This article offers an overview of a strengths-based, appreciative framework of educational leadership that centers on four animating values for flourishing—purpose, passion, play and presence (Cherkowski et al., 2020, 2023).