Accessing, documenting, and communicating practical wisdom: The phronesis, of school leadership practice

Successful school leaders rely on a complex blend of knowledge, skill, theory, disposition, and values in their work to improve student learning. Recent research has called for methods to access, represent, and communicate what successful school leaders know. Aristotle's concept of "phronesis," or practical wisdom, captures the scope of such knowledge but also points out the difficulties of representing practical knowledge apart from the context of exercise. This article argues that the artifacts, such as policies, programs, and procedures, that school leaders develop and use can serve as occasions to document the expression of phronesis in context. Developing phrenetic narratives of how successful leaders use artifacts to establish the conditions for improving student learning provides a significant resource to guide the learning of aspiring school leaders.