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Using a natural language processing tool, this study examined participant discourse in personalized learning schools to better understand what personalized learning looks like in practice. Term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) was used to identify the significant words and potential emergent themes for 134 interview transcripts. This tool provided a way to swiftly explore the structure of the data, revealing distinctions in the vocabulary students and teachers use as well as a potentially meaningful set of themes. This method provided a valuable lens with which to validate or surface new areas for investigation. By applying this tool to interviews from personalized learning environments, we were able to identify ways educators and students talk differently about project-based learning environments, revealing that tools like tf-idf can be effectively used to quickly provide a preliminary look at large amount of interview data.

Personalized learning refers to a collection of practices designed to place student interests and needs at the heart of schooling. Schools that implement personalized learning need leaders that support educators and students in redesigning the core practices of teaching and learning in K-12 schools. To answer the question of how leaders support this redesign, we use distributed leadership theory to focus on the macrotasks and microtasks that leaders enact to create the conditions for personalized learning practices. Drawing on a five-year, qualitative study of 11 personalized learning programs in the Midwest, we identify three macrotasks supporting personalized learning: reorganizing learning environments to support student voice and choice, assembling idiosyncratic technology ecosystems to distribute teaching and learning tasks, and redesigning instructional time to prioritize student's interests, agency, and learning relationships. After we describe a number of microtasks associated with each macrotask, we discuss how a consideration of these kinds of leadership tasks can open the contemporary discussion of personalized learning from a narrow focus on learning technologies to an expansive vision of student-centered school reform.

Using data from a multi-method comparative case study of two matched schools, this paper adds to the growing body of applications of social network analysis to the study of distributed leadership and accountability. We contrast two approaches to instructional leadership, prescriptive and discretionary, to investigate how leaders design professional networks to increase the availability and access of individuals with the expertise needed to perform the analysis required to conduct data-driven instructional improvement. We found that the prescriptive approach to instructional leadership uses comprehensive school reform as a focal artifact to facilitate the widespread use of data for learning when compared to a leadership perspective that aimed at cultivating teacher discretion. We conclude with a discussion of how the concept of cognitive load helps illustrate the design principles leaders can use to create data-driven professional networks in schools.

Recent developments in federal policy have prompted the creation of state evaluation frameworks for principals and teachers that hold educators accountable for effective practices and student outcomes. These changes have created a demand for formative evaluation instruments that reflect current accountability pressures and can be used by schools to focus school improvement and leadership development efforts. The Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning (CALL) is a next generation, 360-degree on-line assessment and feedback system that reflect best practices in feedback design. Some unique characteristics of CALL include a focus on: leadership distributed throughout the school rather than as carried out by an individual leader; assessment of leadership tasks rather than perceptions of leadership practice; a focus on larger complex systems of middle and high school; and transparency of assessment design. This paper describes research contributing to the design and validation of the CALL survey instrument.

Information technologies have reshaped teaching and learning in schools, but often not in ways anticipated by technology proponents. This paper proposes a contrast between technologies for learning and technologies for learners to explain how technologies influence teaching and learning in and out of schools. Schools have made significant use of assessment and instructional technologies that help promote learning for all students, whereas technologies for learners, such as mobile devices, video games, and social networking sites, are typically excluded from school contexts. The paper considers how these contrasting models of technology use will come to shape schools and learning in a pluralistic society.

The Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning (CALL) is a formative assessment that provides feedback to schools on the research-based leadership practices necessary to improve teaching and learning. Instead of focusing on an individual leader, CALL measures leadership practices in tasks carried out by actors across the school and embedded in school policies and practices. All administrators, teachers, and other instructional staff in a building take the CALL survey, and schools receive a customized action-plan detailing the key tasks for improvement.

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.

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. (Contains 1 figure, 1 table and 2 footnotes.)

This article describes how the design of digital learning objects can spark professional learning. The challenge was to build learning objects that would help experienced special education teachers, who had been teaching in math classes, to demonstrate their proficiency in middle and secondary school mathematics on the PRAXIS examination. While the learning sciences have focused on questions of learning new knowledge, the context of how adults recover information they had once studied has received less theoretical attention. The authors' thesis is that a central aspect for helping students to remember content they once learned is to uncover areas of "conceptual breakdown" in ordinary math problems. Their theory is that the phenomenon of conceptual breakdown is different for remembering knowledge than for learning new knowledge. Remembering math involves reassembling misplaced, broken or fragmented conceptual knowledge once learned in school. The design of learning objects allows us to determine which aspects of PRAXIS-type questions highlight conceptual breakdown, and leads us to build learning objects that would help learners reassemble prior concepts to improve capacity to solve similar problems. This article reports on a design-based research investigation to build, implement and assess a series of math learning objects for adult learners. Twelve web-based learning objects were built over the course of 2 years, and tested with 59 adult learners. The authors discuss how the collaborative design process was structured to elicit the breakdown points present in typical math problems; describe an assessment process that produced pre- and post-learning results; and comment on how the design process illustrated their theory of adult math learning recovery and on the prospects for designing learning objects for adult learners.

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. (Contains 1 table, 1 figure, and 1 note.)

Background/Context: School districts are responsible for helping schools improve learning for students. However, many district initiatives conflict with each other or with existing instructional practices in schools. Recent research on urban school reform points to the value of program coherence in sustaining school change. Our paper addresses an urban district's efforts to design for instructional program coherence in its schools. Purpose: This study explores the design process of how one urban school district developed and deployed a series of reports designed to communicate the results of student achievement testing across the district. The focus of this research is to understand the district's efforts to design new programs that would fit coherently into existing initiative in local schools. We attempt to measure and characterize coherence within the district design team as a means to discern how district leaders can assist local actors in implementation of reform initiatives and foster local program coherence within schools. Research Design: This paper presents a qualitative case study of how a district-level nine-member design team built and implemented a reform program to make student performance data reports accessible throughout their district. We used a policy-artifact-based perspective as our methodological framework to access the "program theories" in use by the designers in making the artifact. Our methods allowed us to contrast the differences in the designers' perspectives on the fit between the designed artifacts and the local school environments. Conclusions: The findings from this study revealed how designers developed a stakeholder-based process that helped them come to an agreement on common goals for the design. Their perceptions of the goals, actions, and resources that would drive these initiatives appeared to be aligned, but the actions suggested for local school leaders and teachers varied among designers. This incoherence at the level of design details and artifact implementation would come to threaten the successful implementation of the reform effort at a local level. The results of this work suggest that attention towards coherence throughout the design process can aid district leaders in facilitating instructional program coherence in schools.

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 ongoing 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. (Contains 2 tables.)

Schools have much to learn from video games and the gaming community. By providing compelling activities for motivating otherwise indifferent learners, video games can potentially help teachers improve the design of learning environments. However, there are considerable rhetorical and practical barriers between the schooling and gaming communities grounded in fundamentally different approaches to learning. Whereas schools are moving toward increasingly standardized learning experiences, games offer the prospect of user-defined worlds in which players try out (and get feedback on) their own assumptions, strategies, and identities. It is difficult, at first glance, to see how gaming can help teachers meet the demands of an increasingly standards-driven public schooling system. The adversarial relation between the two cultures heightens the contrast between the underlying theories of gaming and schooling. Many school leaders and teachers react negatively to video games and gaming culture, bashing video games as diversionary threats to the integrity of schooling or as destructive activities that corrupt moral capacity and create a sedentary, motivation-destroying lifestyle. Apart from embracing a few games such as "Oregon Trail" or "SimCity," schools have typically acted to eliminate or marginalize gaming. The strong content and the addictive play of games such as "Doom 3," "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" and "Everquest" have led non-players to overlook the learning principles incorporated into the game design. Thus games have come to typify the essentially subversive side of computing in schools. If leaders and teachers can come to recognize the learning principles of game design, the gaming and schooling communities together can begin to see how to learn from each other and build the next generation of learning environments. In this article, the author first considers leadership for gaming to outline the conditions necessary for the implementation of gaming in education and illustrate some practical ways in which such implementation might take place. He then considers gaming for leadership to argue that the best way for leaders to understand the potential for gaming may be to experience first-hand the power of participating in game-based learning environments.

Successful school leaders rely on a complex blend of knowledge, skill, theory, disposition, and values in their work to improve student learning. Recent research has called for methods to access, represent, and communicate what successful school leaders know. Aristotle's concept of "phronesis," or practical wisdom, captures the scope of such knowledge but also points out the difficulties of representing practical knowledge apart from the context of exercise. This article argues that the artifacts, such as policies, programs, and procedures, that school leaders develop and use can serve as occasions to document the expression of phronesis in context. Developing phronetic narratives of how successful leaders use artifacts to establish the conditions for improving student learning provides a significant resource to guide the learning of aspiring school leaders.

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. (Contains 1 figure and 2 footnotes.)

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.

Background: Across the recent research on school leadership, leadership for learning has emerged as a strong framework for integrating current theories, such as instructional, transformational, and distributed leadership as well as effective human resource practices, instructional evaluation, and resource allocation. Yet, questions remain as to how, and to what extent, teachers and leaders practice the skills and tasks that are known to be associated with effective school leadership, and to what extent do teachers and leaders agree that these practices are taking place in their school. Purpose of the Study: We examine these issues through applying a congruency-typology model to the validation sample of the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning (CALL), (117 schools across the United States, including 3,367 teachers and their school leaders) to examine the extent to which there may be significantly different subgroups of teacher and leader responders to the survey, how these subgroups may cluster nonrandomly in schools, and to what extent the subgroups of teachers and principals are aligned or not on their perception that the skills and practices of leadership for learning take place in their school. Research Design: We used multilevel latent class analysis (LCA) to identify significantly different types of teacher and leader responders to CALL, including a cross-level interaction to examine the extent to which there is a typology model of teacher responders across schools and the extent to which the teacher subgroup responses align with the leader of the school. Findings: We find that there are three statistically significant different subgroups of teacher responders to CALL, low (31.4%), moderate (43.3%), and high (25.4%). In addition, these subgroups cluster nonrandomly across three different types of schools: schools with low leadership for learning (40.2%), moderate leadership for learning (47.0%), and the smallest subgroup, schools with high leadership for learning (12.8%). Conclusions: Our findings suggest that a congruency-typology model of leadership for learning is useful for understanding the context of practice, as schools may be on a continuum of practice in which there is strong alignment between teacher and leader responder types in the low and high schools--indicating problematic or beneficial contexts--but that leaders in the moderate type may be working to move their school towards instructional improvement through leadership for learning. As a quantitative phenomenology, this study provides a rich contextual analysis of the relationship between teachers and leaders on a multisource feedback survey of leadership for learning in schools.

Argues for scholarship that investigates leadership practice; specifically, the practice of leading classroom instruction. Articulates a distributed perspective, grounded in activity theory and distributed cognition, to frame such investigations. Suggests that school leadership is best understood as a distributed practice stretched over the school's social and situational contexts. (SM)

Looked at errors produced by 155 students developing spreadsheets while they were working alone, in groups of two, and in groups of three. Determined that synchronous team spreadsheet development is promising but expensive and does not seem to be a cure-all for spreadsheet errors. (JOW)

Discusses how local school leaders construct the conditions for professional community in their schools. Arguing that professional community is a special form of social capital resulting in part from the design and implementation of facilitating structural networks by instructional leaders in schools. (SLD)