ABSTRACT
("Leadership as pPractice") brings leadership as activity or practice into the foreground. It is reaffirmed as one of the five essential leadership for learning (LfL) principles. This is particularly relevant as a counter to the strength of the prevailing rhetoric on "heroic" leadership. In other words, the implementation of leadership as practice challenges individualistic positional approaches which occupy a pervasive presence in system and school hierarchies. The focus of the chapter is on an alternative view in which leadership is enacted in practice, bringing people together in collaborative dialogue. At the centre of leadership as practice is the spontaneous pursuit of professional learning and pedagogical activity, focused primarily on student needs. Drawing on Simpson's (2016) analysis of the work of Dewey and Bentley (1949) on self-action, inter-action, and trans-action, the discussion examines human agency using Simpson's three leadership perspectives - the leader-practitioner, leadership as a set of practices often distributed, and leadership in the flow of practice. While all three are evident in education systems, when a LfL stance is apparent, the latter two categories come into prominence, encouraging open dialogue and increasingly frequent extemporaneous agency.
