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The recent press for high-stakes accountability has challenged school leaders to use data to guide the practices of teaching and learning. This article considers how local school leaders build data-driven instructional systems to systematically improve student learning. Such systems are presented as a framework involving data acquisition, data reflection, program alignment and integration, program design, formative feedback, and test preparation. The article reviews data collected in a yearlong study of four schools to describe how leaders structure opportunities to engage in data-driven decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the idea of distributed instructional leadership as a way to understand instructional leadership practice in comprehensive high schools. Our argument is that distributed leadership analyses allow researchers to uncover and explain how instructional improvement in high schools occurs through the efforts of multiple individuals working to simultaneously influence the contexts of leadership and the contexts of instruction. The distributed instructional leadership model draws on the full potential of distributed leadership to describe not only who is involved with high school reforms but also what situated tools, tasks, and routines are required to change and maintain improved teaching. The first part of the article develops an account of distributed instructional leadership as an approach to studying how leaders create high school learning environments, by drawing on research in distributed cognition. The second part provides an illustration of how the ideas of distributed instructional leadership were applied to the analysis of a curriculum-based reform in a comprehensive high school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the comprehensive assessment of leadership for effective practices and student outcomes. It mentions the federal policies that have created a demand for formative evaluation instruments that can be used by schools to focus on school improvement and leadership development efforts. It informs about the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning (CALL) on-line assessment and feedback system.

Data-driven instructional improvement relies on developing coherent systems that allow school staff to generate, interpret, and act upon quality formative information on students and school programs. This article offers a formative feedback system model that captures how school leaders and teachers structure artifacts and practices to create formative information flows across interventions, assessments, and actuation spaces. A formative feedback system model describes the organizational capacity upon which innovations such as comprehensive school reforms, benchmark assessment systems, and student behavior management systems draw to improve teaching and learning in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors propose the concept of competitive fandom to describe the learning, play, and engagement of fantasy sports. Competitive fandom draws together contemporary research on fan cultures and game design and game communities to describe the interaction present in fantasy sports. Fantasy sports games require a combination of fan culture practices and gamers' skills and habits of mind. Fandom becomes competitive when the knowledge acquired in the fan domain is transformed into strategic information to guide play in a new kind of game. This combination of frames helps describe the kinds of knowledge and motivation required to play fantasy sports and how such participation sparks further learning. Through analysis of individual game play within the context of the league community in which fantasy team owners play, the authors aim to understand what and how people learn from playing in competitive fandom settings and the implications of these findings for the design of learning environments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose: The authors adapted distributed cognition theory to provide a detailed account of how school leaders use knowledge of the new programs, existing initiatives, and school contexts to guide policy implementation. Research Design: The study used distributed cognition theory to show how policy implementation studies provide an occasion to understand the influence of context on practice. The article focuses on a case study of(a) a suburban district design of a teacher evaluation policy and (b) a principal's effort to use the evaluation program with the teachers in her middle school. The authors adapted the distributed cognition theory to provide an analytic framework to better address the issues of school leadership. Findings: The authors found that the design of the policy required teacher evaluators to address the tensions between summative and formative evaluation implicit in the program design. In this case, the principal relied heavily on her discretion to determine which features of the teacher evaluation policy would be emphasized with different teachers. The case also provided insight into how the principal reconciled the demands of evaluation with on going instructional and personnel demands. Conclusions: The distributed cognition framework provided a valuable tool for organizing close studies of the cognitive and contextual dimensions of leadership practice and can provide valuable information about how policies can be designed and used to shape real changes in everyday practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that the inability of schools to embrace new core technologies lies in the nature of schools as social institutions. Thus the catalytic power of information technologies is likely to leave the core practices of schooling untouched, and instead open up a wide range of alternative learning venues to traditional schools. We see the seeds of a technology-driven, alternative system emerging in the recent movements toward home schooling, virtual schools, distance education, learning centers, workplace learning, and informal learning opportunities. As these venues continue to develop, we believe they will begin to converge as a viable alternative to the existing school systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No abstract received. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the importance of constructing and maintaining conditions for improving student learning within existing school systems. Reliance of school leaders to skill, theory and values for improving student learning; Knowledge on how to apply general learning principles; Need for a useful, principled, professional knowledge in educational leadership.

Computer-based multimedia technologies have great potential for providing rich learning opportunities for school leaders in the context of their work. One promising avenue is the development of hypertext narratives of practice that can capture and communicate the complexities of exemplary leadership practice. This paper discusses the construction and user-testing of a multimedia narrative of practice based on Breakfast Club, an innovative program intended to develop a professional community in an urban elementary school. First, the paper develops an account of professional expertise that suggests the practical wisdom of school leaders needs to be represented in context. Multimedia cases of practice that represent such wisdom begin with the programs school leaders design to alter the instructional programs of their schools. Second, the paper describes the development of a question-based multimedia case of practice designed around the questions that school leaders are likely to ask about new programs in order to facilitate their own understanding. Finally, the paper offers an analysis of a round of user-testing with fourteen school leaders conducted to refine and rebuild the multimedia narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]