On Principal's Practical Wisdom

The contemporary education is in the critical moment which is turning from culture of knowledge to wisdom. The diversity and amalgamation of cultures, the conflict and collision of values, the accumulation and release of contradictions, and the breeding of new substance create the circumstance of principals' professional life in current China. The principal's practical wisdom that is full of changes and creativity is of great significance in theory and practice to the sustainable development of education, school improvement and principal's professional development. It is not only a possible rescue method for school management and the principals, but also concerned the ontological question that how to understand school management and principals.The principal's practical wisdom refers to his comprehensive qualities by which he, on the basis of ethical values, observes and solves the school management issues by utilizing his knowledge and experience. As the outcome of high integration of educational science and the art of management, the principal's practical wisdom contains the essential rules as follows:firstly, it pursues the rationality of education management; secondly, it is the reflection, discretion and insight of school management practice; thirdly, it highlights the meaning of individual life. According to different classification standards, the principal's practical wisdom could be divided into different types while they still present some common features. From the perspective of internal characteristics, the principal's practical wisdom has the obvious features such as situationality, tacitness, flexibility, ethicality and transcendence. From the perspective of external representation, the principal's practical wisdom represents insight and understanding with whole concern, acute analysis and resolute judgment, critical self-reflection with values, pedagogical tact of adapting to new situations and innovation management without losing any opportunities.The realistic value of principal's practical wisdom represents two patterns, which are ontological value and instrumental value, and they have inherent connection of dialectical unity in the principal's professional practice. Ontological value has active effect on principal's development, which is a great promotion to the principal's professional development, self-actualization, returning to the real world, developing virtues, enriching the life connotation and achieving happiness in life and so on. The instrumental value of principal's practical wisdom means it could promote school management, education reform and social development. On the school's side, the principal's practical wisdom could ease tensions between theory and practice of school management, so that it could be benefitial for school management. For the whole education system, the principal's practical wisdom could restrict the alienation of education and promote optimization of education ethics. On the social side, the principal's practical wisdom could build up wisdom culture and nurture talents.The principal's practical wisdom evolves with the characteristics of national spirit and education thoughts of each country. It not only reflects the essence of the education thought in different periods, but also represents the special features of different countries. A group of intelligent school leaders, such as Adolph Diesterweg, Suhomlingsky, Alexander Sutherland Neill, Obara Kuniyoshi, Confucius, Zhang Boling, Tao Xingzhi and so on, provide the historical paradigms of the principal's practical wisdom for our exploration. Affected by different cultural environments in various countries, Chinese and foreign principal's practical wisdom show some differences regarding to personality, especially the principal's practical wisdom styles influenced by the eastern and western culture. However, Chinese and foreign principal's practical wisdom still present some commonness:the principal's practical wisdom is based on the personal faith and the spirit of innovation; the cultivation of principal's practical wisdom needs to combine learning and thinking, and so on, which are helpful for us to explore the developmental path of principal's practical wisdom.The Practical-Wisdom-Analysis-Model provides us a possible approach to access and present the principal's practical wisdom, which facilitates the researcher to capture effective information from complex educational environment. With the help of this model, the author resorts to the narrative inquiry to study two Chinese school principals'practical wisdom, in order to reflect the real situation of the current principal's practical wisdom. We catch the current reality situation of principal's practical wisdom through the stories, the help of related research and media information. In the real world, with the influence of traditional school management system and the current education reform, the principal's practical wisdom presents some imbalances, which mainly performance as following:deep sleeping and awakening of the consciousness, ambiguous and anxiety on border, and the statute and release on survival space of the principal's practical wisdom.The cultivation process of principal's practical wisdom is dynamic and coupled with principal's professional development, which is not only affected by some subjective factors such as individual experience, knowledge, thinking pattern, character and so on, but also influenced by external factors like organizational climate, school culture, system environment, professional education, and so on. Ecological Systems Theory regards individual development as dynamic process that living system and environmental system co-evolution. It breaks through the ontology predicament of the anthropocentrism, overcomes the isolation defect of the one-dimensional thinking mode, and provides a feasible approach for the development of principal's practical wisdom. The development system of principal's practical wisdom that structured base on the Ecological Systems Theory, is mainly made up by three basic parts:ecological subject, ecological environment and ecological factors, which shows a stereochemical structure by macro, medium and micro-levels of each penetration, dynamic and static mutually combined. In this complex system, each subsystem and its components interact with each other; and jointly promote the practical wisdom of ecological succession, which let the principal's practical wisdom to implement a dynamic evolution from nonexistence to existence, and from low to high.The development strategies of principal's practical wisdom based on ecosystem mainly refer to self-cultivate of principal as the body of ecosystem and continuous improvement of ecological environment. As the behavior subject and the person who is responsible for practical wisdom development, the principal should consider the acquisition of practical wisdom as his/her key point in the professional development, so that the life value and energy could be inspired. Principals should broaden the cultural horizon and optimize study methods on the basis of firm education belief, strengthen practical self-reflection and action research base on cultivation of noble spirit and concern, and pursue the way to make knowledge-action-thinking develop in coordination. At the same time, education administrative department, principal training institutions and the other social forces should work together on constructing harmonious ecological environment of the principal's practical wisdom development, to ensure that school environment, system circumstance and training environment optimize cooperatively, which will expand the development space of principal's practical wisdom.