James P. Spillane

Investigating School Leadership Practice: A Distributed Perspective

actions, and interactions of school leadership as they unfold together in the daily life of schools. The research program involves in-depth observations and interviews with formal and informal leaders and classroom teachers as well as a social network analysis in schools in the Chicago metropolitan area. We outline the distributed framework below, beginning with a brief review of the theoretical underpinnings for this work—distributed cognition and activity theory—which we then use to re-approach the subject of leadership practice. Next we develop our distributed theory of leadership around four ideas: leadership tasks and functions, task enactment, social distribution of task enactment, and situational distribution of task enactment. Our central argument is that school leadership is best understood as a distributed practice, stretched over the school’s social and situational contexts.

Towards a theory of leadership practice: a distributed perspective

School‐level conditions and school leadership, in particular, are key issues in efforts to change instruction. While new organizational structures and new leadership roles matter to instructional innovation, what seems most critical is how leadership practice is undertaken. Yet, the practice of school leadership has received limited attention in the research literature. Building on activity theory and theories of distributed cognition, this paper develops a distributed perspective on school leadership as a frame for studying leadership practice, arguing that leadership practice is constituted in the interaction of school leaders, followers, and the situation.

Policy Implementation and Cognition: Reframing and Refocusing Implementation Research

Education policy faces a familiar public policy challenge: Local implementation is difficult. In this article we develop a cognitive framework to characterize sense-making in the implementation process that is especially relevant for recent education policy initiatives, such as standards-based reforms that press for tremendous changes in classroom instruction. From a cognitive perspective, a key dimension of the implementation process is whether, and in what ways, implementing agents come to understand their practice, potentially changing their beliefs and attitudes in the process. We draw on theoretical and empirical literature to develop a cognitive perspective on implementation. We review the contribution of cognitive science frames to implementation research and identify areas where cognitive science can make additional contributions.

Reconstructing Conceptions of Local Capacity: The Local Education Agency's Capacity for Ambitious Instructional Reform.

In this article, the authors argue that the notion of local capacity needs to be rethought in light of the extraordinary demands for learning imposed on local educators by the current wave of instructional reforms. Confining their discussion to the local education agency (LEA), the authors argue that the LEA’s capacity to support ambitious instruction consists to a large degree of LEA leaders’ ability to learn new ideas from external policy and professional sources and to help others within the district learn these ideas. Drawing on a study of nine school districts, they identify three interrelated dimensions of this capacity—human capital, social capital, and financial resources.

Distributed leadership through the looking glass

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Managing in the Middle: School Leaders and the Enactment of Accountability Policy

This article investigates how mid-level managers make sense of and mediate district accountability policy. Arguing that teachers’evolving perceptions and understanding of accountability policies are likely to be mediated by school leaders, the authors explore how school managers enact their policy environments, focusing chiefly on the ways in which they construct district accountability policies. Adopting a cognitive or interpretive frame on implementation, the authors illuminate how school leaders’ sense-making is situated in their professional biographies, building histories, and roles as intermediaries between the district office and classroom teachers.

State Policy and the Non-Monolithic Nature of the Local School District: Organizational and Professional Considerations

This article examines how the local school district’s non-monolithic character undermines state level efforts to create more coherent guidance for instruction of teachers. Exploring two school districts’ responses to a state reading policy, the author suggests that what the school district does by way of enacting state policy is not always internally homogenous: The image of the school district that emerges is one of a non-monolithic agency of instructional guidance. Attempting to unravel and explain the internal variation in the school district’s response to state policy, the author considers the school district’s organizational arrangements as well as the professional specializations and associations of district staff.

Taking a Distributed Perspective to the School Principal's Workday

Focusing on the school principals day-to-day work, we examine who leads curriculum and instruction- and administration-related activities when the school principal is not leading but participating in the activity. We also explore the prevalence of coperformance of management and leadership activities in the school principals workday. Looking across a range of administration-related and curriculum and instruction-related activities school principals participate in, we show that who takes responsibility for leading and managing the schoolhouse varies considerably from activity to activity and from one school to the next.

Data in Practice: Conceptualizing the Data-Based Decision-Making Phenomena

“Data use” and “data-based decision making” are increasingly popular mantras in public policy discourses and texts. Policy makers place tremendous faith in the power of data to transform practice, but the fate of policy makers’ efforts will depend in great measure on the very practice they hope to move. In most conversations about data use, however, relations between data and practice have been underconceptualized. In this essay, I identify and discuss some conceptual and analytical tools for studying data in practice by drawing on work from various theoretical traditions. I explore some ways in which we might frame a research agenda in order to investigate data in everyday practice in schools. My account is centered on schoolhouse work practice, but the research apparatus I consider can be applied to practice in other organizations in the education sector and indeed to interorganizational practice, a critical consideration in the education sector.

Organizational Routines as Coupling Mechanisms Policy, School Administration, and the Technical Core

The institutional environment of America’s schools has changed substantially as government regulation has focused increasingly on the core technical work of schools—instruction. The authors explore the school administrative response to this changing environment, describing how government regulation becomes embodied in the formal structure of four schools. Working at coupling government regulation with classroom teaching, school leaders transformed the formal structure, paying particular attention to designing new organizational routines. Analyzing the performance of these routines, the authors show how both government regulation and the technical core featured prominently, if selectively, and explore how routines enabled coupling by promoting standardization through alignment with common standards, by monitoring teacher and student performance, and by making aspects of instruction transparent.