Education leaders make difficult ethical decisions each day. Using the story of a preschool director in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001, the authors detail a series of paradigms to help educational leaders navigate rationally through challenging and complex circumstances when they are under considerable emotional stress. One approach which can help educational leaders make decisions is through the combined use of multiple ethical paradigms and turbulence theory. The multiple ethical paradigms of justice, critique, care and the profession provide rational ways to work through ethical dilemmas. Turbulence theory offers another dimension in dealing with cases. It takes into account the emotional context of the ethical dilemma and provides ways to calm it down or even sometimes, in the case of complacency or silence, move it to a higher level of turbulence for action to occur. By presenting authentic teaching cases combined with theory to work through ethical dilemmas, educational administration programs can encourage thoughtful and intelligent moral decision making among school leaders for this era and the future.