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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 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]

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 initiatives 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]