Practical Wisdom

Aristotle’s idea of phronesis, or practical wisdom, describes how leaders design solutions for problems in the context of everyday practice. Much of my early work was to draw on ideas from distributed cognition, socio-cultural activity theory, and human-computer interaction translate phronesis into a viable theory of practical expertise and a method for engaging in social science research. My thinking about practical wisdom also informed by writing about design and about education research.

Halverson, R. (2001). Representing Phronesis: Documenting instructional leadership practice in schools. Dissertation submitted to the Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy.

Halverson, R. (2004) Accessing, documenting and communicating the phronesis of school leadership practice. American Journal of Education, 111(1), 90-122.

Halverson, R & Halverson, E. (2011) Education as design for learning: A model for integrating education inquiry across research traditions. In C. F. Conrad & R. C. Serlin (Eds). Sage Handbook for Research in Education: Engaging Ideas and Enriching Inquiry (2nd Ed.). Sage: Thousand Oaks, CA.

Halverson, R. Blakesley, C & Figuerido-Brown, R. (2011). Video-game design as a model for professional learning. In M. S. Khine (Ed.) Learning to Play: Exploring the Future of Education with Video Games. Peter Lang: New York. 9-28.

Halverson, R., and Clifford, M. (2006) Evaluation in the wild: A distributed cognition perspective on teacher assessment.  Education Administration Quarterly 42(4). 578-619.