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Leadership and Learning: Conceptualizing Relations Between School Administrative Practice and Instructional Practice

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How School Leaders Contribute to Student Success

Part of the book series: Studies in Educational Leadership ((SIEL,volume 23))

Abstract

In this chapter the author argues that one problem we face in understanding relations between school leadership and student learning is that core constructs in our work are often variably and weakly defined. Loose constructs pose problems because they contribute to fuzzy research, especially if constructs such as school leadership, management, or even instruction are weakly (or never explicitly) defined and operationalized. Fuzzy conceptualization makes comparing across studies, essential to the development of a robust empirical knowledge base, difficult if not impossible.

Arguing that a critical but often overlooked challenge in studying relations between school administration and student learning is conceptual in nature, the author begins by conceptualizing school administration and instruction from what he refers to as a distributed perspective, using theoretical work in distributed and situated cognition, activity theory, and micro sociology. The chapter shows how conceptualizing phenomena under study in particular ways shapes how we might frame and hypothesize relations among these phenomena. The chapter contrasts a distributed conceptualization with more conventional, individually focused conceptualizations of both phenomena. It then considers the entailments of this conceptualization of the two cores phenomena for framing relations between them.

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Acknowledgements

This paper has benefited tremendously from several collaborative writing projects over the past decade. In particular papers with Kaleen Healey, Karen Seashore Louis, and Mary Kay Stein (Spillane and Healey 2010; Spillane and Louis 2002; Stein and Spillane 2005).

Work on this article was supported by the Distributed Leadership Studies (http://www.distributedleadership.org) funded by research grants from the National Science Foundation (REC–9873583, RETA Grant # EHR–0412510), the Institute for Education Sciences (Grant # R305E040085), and the Spencer Foundation (200000039). Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy and Institute for Policy Research supported this work. All opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any funding agency.

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  1. Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, 60208-0001, Evanston, IL, USA

    James Spillane

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  1. James Spillane
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  1. University of Toronto, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto, Ontario, Ontario, Canada

    Kenneth Leithwood

  2. University of Alabama, The College of Education University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA

    Jingping Sun

  3. Western University, Faculty of Education Western University, London, Ontario, Canada

    Katina Pollock

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Spillane, J. (2017). Leadership and Learning: Conceptualizing Relations Between School Administrative Practice and Instructional Practice. In: Leithwood, K., Sun, J., Pollock, K. (eds) How School Leaders Contribute to Student Success. Studies in Educational Leadership, vol 23. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50980-8_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50980-8_4

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