Spiral Model of Phronesis Development: Social-emotional and character development in low-resourced urban schools

The highest form of virtuous behavior in the Aristotelian virtue ethics approach to character education involves practical wisdom, or phronesis, which allows an individual to act in the right way about the right things for the right reasons. Here, we use our experiences with social-emotional and character development (SECD) in low-resourced urban middle schools to put forth a Spiral Model of Phronesis Development. We aim to contextualize phronesis development to reflect the realities of students of color attending low-resourced urban schools and provide a theoretical framework for cultivating phronesis and developing curricula in this setting. We include a description of how we have applied this theory to an SECD curriculum currently being taught in urban middle schools (ages 11-14).