This conceptual framework is grounded in the data analysis of transcribed interviews with 50 Ontario teachers and the text of a 7-month online discussion group among 25 principals from England, Ireland, Canada, United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Both methods were employed with the stated purpose of understanding emotional experiences of educational leadership. A normative professional silence about emotion renders inner-emotional processes largely unacknowledged in the legitimate discourses of educational leadership research, theory, and practice. Like cognitive processes, emotional ways of knowing also affect our experience of self, the ways we engage with others, our public image, our comfort with ambiguity, our level of need for control, the ways we experience leading and teaching, and our sense of moral community. Cognitive epistemological frameworks have conceptualized "connection" as important for developing more complex forms of thinking. This paper proposes that emotional ways of knowing are also epistemological. It argues that emotional epistemologies work in ways similar to cognitive processes. In this conception of emotional epistemologies are the themes of silence, authority, connection, and context that emerged as central to these teachers' and leaders' emotional meaning-making systems. The model suggests that emotional epistemologies can function differently in different contexts and become open to transformation and development. (Contains 71 references.)(RT)