NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY Representing Phronesis: Supporting Instructional Leadership Practice in Schools A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS For the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Field of Education and Social Policy – Learning Sciences By Richard R. Halverson EVANSTON, ILLINOIS June 2002 Copyright by Richard R. Halverson 2002 All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Sharing the practical wisdom of successful instructional leadership should be a key component of learning to be a school leader. The Aristotelian concept of phronesis provides a powerful organizing idea for understanding how we can access, document and communicate the wisdom of school leadership practice.
This dissertation explores how phronesis can serve as guide for communicating the successful practices of school leadership through the development of innovative multimedia learning technologies. As the basis for a research method, phronesis is best expressed through narratives of practice that relay how strategies, goals, constraints, affordances and resources unfold in the enactment of leadership work. This dissertation argues that locally designed artifacts provide touchstones for researchers to access and communicate the wisdom of leadership practice. The research described here focuses on the case of Adams School, a Chicago Public elementary school whose sustained record of improved student achievement has been attributed, both within and outside the school, to outstanding leadership practice.
Over the course of three years, a research team gathered observations, interviews and artifacts at Adams to document their practical wisdom. I present a Design Cycle Analysis Model to show how these data were organized into artifact- based narratives of practice. The data analysis section describes three narratives of practice organized around locally-designed artifacts: • a professional development program (Breakfast Club); • a formative assessment program (Five-Week Assessment); • and a school-improvement planning process (SIP). One of the narratives, Breakfast Club, was used as the basis for constructing a multimedia narrative of practice.
The Breakfast Club case is then user-tested with Adams leaders and with interested practitioners from a variety of school settings to determine the fidelity and verisimilitude of the representation. i The conceptual framework and the methods discussed here contribute toward the development of principled research methods to make complex practices accessible to interested practitioners. Hopefully, this research will point toward fruitful ways for researchers to attend to the particulars of practice as their primary work, instead of as obstacles that must be overcome on the way to epistemic generalizations about practice. The phronesis is, after all, in the particulars.
ii DEDICATION Practical wisdom, the central topic of this dissertation, has influenced my philosophical interests for as long as I remember. As I began to study philosophy as an undergraduate at Marquette University, I had the good fortune to learn from men such as James Robb, Walter Stohrer, and Michael Boylan, that philosophy was a matter of not only thinking well, but also of living well. In my graduate studies in philosophy, I turned from contemporary thinkers to reexamine the works of Plato and Aristotle. My guide and mentor in my graduate work, Reginald Allen, showed us the difference between the study of philosophy and of antiquity by bringing out what William James would call the “live options” implicit in the ethics and metaphysics of the Greeks.
Reg’s low-key elicitation of the drama inherent in the Platonic dialogues, the live options not well-addressed by the modern and post-modern metaphysical presuppositions, led me to understand how new questions can be sparked by very old answers. I wish to thank my colleagues and friends, Barbara Preslin, Paula Etheridge, Joe Sowinski and Kathy Woytych at Seton Academy in South Holland Illinois, where I learned to teach and had the extraordinary opportunity to work with educators and leaders of the heart. In particular, I would like to thank Roberta Felker for taking a chance on a philosophy student with no teaching experience to teach in her school, for her encouragement to put my ideals to the test, and for her example of how a real leader lives and leads. I remain very grateful for the opportunity to return to graduate school in mid-career.
The Learning Sciences program at Northwestern University provided the ideal blend of challenging ideas, practical opportunities to do real work in real schools, and invigorating conversations with professors and peers. In particular, I wish to acknowledge three of my professors at Northwestern. Louis Gomez proved an advisor in the true sense, providing opportunities and constraints that iii challenged me to elaborate our ideas through practical application. I will always consider our give-and-take about course planning, research design and educational philosophy as the gold standard for an advisor relationship.
James Spillane offered the opportunity to develop a research program together, from the ground up, and provided me my first chance to publish and present my work. Allan Collins encouraged me to pursue my instincts in my thinking and my writing. I also wish to thank Northwestern University and the National Science Foundation for their generous support throughout of my graduate career. I am particularly grateful to the Spencer Foundation for supporting my graduate career through Research Training Grants and through a Dissertation Year Fellowship that allowed me the time and space to complete my writing.
I would also like to acknowledge several of my friends and colleagues. Matt Brown, Joyce Ma, Lisa Bouillion, Franci Steinmuller and Beth van Es came into the Learning Sciences program with me and I am grateful for their support and their friendship. Greg Shrader’s work as a mentor and trail-blazer in developing the Living Curriculum project helped me to see what a multimedia system of practice might look like in real life. Don Sorsa is a good, critical friend and bolstered my confidence with his “racquetball” game.
Baylen Linnekin’s work on the user testing process helped make sense of how we can test verisimilitude. I would like to thank John Diamond, Jennifer Zoltners, Lauren Banks, Elisa Mandell, Michelle Green and Robb Lindgren for their work in helping to think through and engage in the field work discussed here. Barbara Watkins, Mary Rogers, Tom Ziencina, Geralynn Wilson, Rhonda Allen, Ben Southworth, LouEllen Finn and Melovee Williamson helped me to understand the challenges and rewards of teaching in Chicago Public Schools. Steve Sewall and Dick Baran helped to keep me sane and semi-sober during my writing.
My parents, Roger and Pat Halverson, always encouraged us that we could be anything we wanted to be, and their love made it possible for us to take iv advantage of the opportunities that came our way. I would like to thank my brothers Ron and Rob Halverson for their support, love and conversation in helping me through my graduate study. The wonder and spontaneity of my children Nick and Katja Halverson remain my inspiration. Finally, Erica Rosenfeld has not only read and helped me to refine all my writing, but has changed my life with her charm, her insight and her warmth.
v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract .iii Table of Contents. vi List of Tables. xi List of Figures.1 Why leadership practice?.1 Chapter 1: Understanding Phronesis .2 Chapter 2: Accessing Phronesis.3 Chapter 3: Representing Phronesis .4 Chapter 4: Sharing Phronesis.1 Aristotle and Phronesis .1 Plato and the Philosopher King .2 Odysseus and Metis .3 Phronesis as a Bridge between Episteme and Metis.4 Phronesis : Praxis :: Techne : Poeisis .5 Experience and the Good .1 Phronesis and Casuistry.2 Phronesis and Apprenticeship.3 Phronesis and Reflective Practice .4 Phronesis and Practical Argument .3 Phronesis and Leadership.1 Distributed Cognition and Leadership.1 Communities as Individuals Writ Large .5 The Distributed Leadership Framework .4 Phronesis and Expertise .1 Phronesis and Problem-solving .2 Phronesis and Experience.3 The Expertise of School Leadership.1 Design: Opening a Window on Practice.2 Narrative Reconstruction and Analysis .3 Artifacts as a Window into Practice: DCAM .4 Multimedia Case Design.1 Case Design and the Living Curriculum.5 Research Site Selection .1 Research Site: Adams School .6 Data Collection and Representation. 122 vii 3 Documenting Phronesis .3 Building Professional Community: the Breakfast Club .1 Breakfast Club: Problem-Setting.2 Breakfast Club: Problem-solving .3 Iterations of Breakfast Club: Consequent Artifacts.4 Standardized Testing: the Five-Week Assessment .1 What is the Five-Week Assessment? How does it work?.2 Five-Week Assessment: Problem-setting .3 Five-Week Assessment: Problem-solving .4 Five-Week Assessment: Iterations .1 Language-Arts Committee .2 Administrative Modeling of Instructional Practices .5 Site-Based Planning: the School Improvement Plan.1 What is the School Improvement Plan?.2 The SIP Artifact Itself.3 SIP Problem-setting .4 SIP Problem-solving .1 SIP Problem-Solving Process: Pre-service 1999.2 SIP Problem-Solving Process: Fall-Winter 1999 .3 SIP Design Process: Spring 2000 .1 Language Arts SIP meeting .2 Math SIP meeting.4 Using Standardized Test Scores to Assess SIP Priorities .3 Tentative Action Plan.2 LCSL: The Design of Multimedia Narratives of Practice .1 Internal Audience: Adams Leaders .1 Breakfast Club as a condition for subsequent development.2 Breakfast Club as an occasion for reflection on practice.1 (How) Was the video relevant to the case presentation? .2 What does this program remind you of in your school? .3 Would Breakfast Club work in your school? .1 Redesign issue 1: Integrating video into presentation.2 Redesign issue 2: Balancing linear and non-linear narrative path.3 Redesign issue 3: Situating Breakfast Club in LCSL context.4 Redesign issue 4: Representing the process vs.
261 5 Reflection on Phronesis.1 Phronesis and episteme in research.2 Characteristics of practical wisdom .1 Problem-setting, or apperception.3 Patterns in problem–solving.3 Phronesis, metis and the higher good .3 An epistemology of phronesis?.4 Applications of phronesis research. 312 x LIST OF TABLES Table 1 Trade-offs in using collaborative design opportunities. 122 Table 2 Contrast between narrative and paradigmatic reasoning. 125 Table 3 Adams Artifacts.
132 Table 4 Sample Five-Week Assessment Schedule. 203 Table 5 Summary of Adams 1999-2001 SIP Section 3 Budget. 245 Table 6 Comparing results of Adams1999-2000 to 1998-99 ISAT. 272 Table 7 Parallel ISAT discussions.
208 Table 8 Question hierarchy for LCSL Ask System. 294 xi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 Activity Theory Model. 79 Figure 2 Design-Cycle Analysis Model (DCAM). 136 Figure 3 Application of Design-Cycle Analysis Model (DCAM).
140 Figure 4 Adams ITBS % students at/above national norms. 155 Figure 5 Adams IGAP % students at/above national norms. 157 Figure 6 Original Design-Cycle Analysis Model (DCAM). 164 Figure 7 Breakfast Club DCAM.
181 Figure 8 Five-Week Assessment DCAM. 200 Figure 9 School Improvement Plan DCAM. 296 Figure 11 Place of district-level administrators in instructional leadership. 340 Figure 13 Situating the Breakfast Club in a wider LC context.
343 Figure 14 Narrowing the Problem-Space. 371 xii REPRESENTING PHRONESIS: DOCUMENTING THE PRACTICAL WISDOM OF SCHOOL LEADERSHIP 0.0 Introduction1 Successful work practices, in management, administration and teaching, are often inaccessible to researchers. We can recognize good practice when we see it, we can evaluate the outcomes of practices, and we can study the conditions of successful practices. But the practices themselves remain inaccessible to study.
Practice is a complex phenomenon with at least three different aspects that cone together in human activity. First, practice refers to the day-to-day activity in which people routinely engage. Second, practice retains its ordinary sense in the repetition of actions to increase proficiency. And third, the regularities of practice can emerge into chunked traditions of behavior that are passed down as legitimate cultural or organizational packages of behavior.
Researchers have focused on each of these elements of practice: Taylor’s (1911; 1998) early and Mintzberg’s more 1 This work draws upon and extends the research of two funded projects: 1) the Living Curriculum project (PIs Louis Gomez, Daniel Edelson and James Spillane: NSF Grant # 9720423) an NSF funded effort to develop web-based multimedia systems to share the practice of project-based science teaching with the education community; and 2) the Distributed Leadership project (PI James Spillane: NSF Grant #9819252 ) an NSF and Spencer Foundation funded effort to examine how leadership practices are socially and situationally distributed in urban elementary schools around math and literacy instruction.