Professional Documents
Culture Documents
03 SPILLANE - Et - Al-2002-Yearbook - of - The - National - Society - For - The - Study - of - Education PDF
03 SPILLANE - Et - Al-2002-Yearbook - of - The - National - Society - For - The - Study - of - Education PDF
The belief that the school is the key unit of change has become
something of a mantra among scholars and practitioners over the past
20 years. Hence, efforts to understand the process of school improve-
ment, as well as a variety of interventions that focus on school im-
provement, have flourished. Our goal in this paper is not to undertake
an exhaustive review of the literature on school improvement, but
rather to frame or perhaps reframe this work. Specifically, we stand
back from scholarship that falls under the school improvement rubric
and develop a conceptual scaffold for thinking about this line of re-
search and its relation to teaching and learning in schools.
We begin by arguing that the bottom line for school improvement
initiatives is student learning. Hence, school improvement has to be
about improving students’ opportunities to learn in order to improve
both easily measurable and subtler achievement. While that may be an
obvious point, in much of the literature relations between the process
of school improvement and students’ opportunities to learn remain im-
plicit or blurred. Our central task in this chapter is to develop a frame-
work for making relations between the process and practice of school
improvement and students’ opportunities to learn more explicit. Be-
cause classroom instruction is the proximal cause of students’ opportu-
nities to learn, we begin by adopting a perspective on instruction that
anchors our model of the school improvement process. We argue that
absent such a framework, it is difficult to explicate relations between
school improvement and students’ opportunities to learn. Next, adopt-
ing a “backward mapping” strategy (Elmore, 1979) we work backwards
Karen Seashore Louis is Professor of Educational Policy and Administration in the
College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota and
Director of the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement. James
Spillane is Associate Professor in the School of Education and Social Policy and Faculty
Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University.
83
84 PROFESSIONAL LEARNING FOR INSTRUCTIONAL C A PA C I T Y
EDUCATIONAL KNOWLEDGE
STUDENTS AS LEARNERS
TEACHER BELIEFS
Conclusion
In this chapter we have developed a framework that makes rela-
tions between the processes of school improvement and students’
opportunities to learn more explicit. Anchoring our model of the
school improvement process in a particular perspective on instruction,
we mapped backwards from instruction to the classroom, the profes-
sional community, and school organization and leadership, examining
how each might support learning from and about instruction. We
argued that if school improvement is to make a difference for chil-
dren, it has to be fundamentally focused on improving the “core tech-
nology” of schools, that is, instruction. Instructional improvement
depends on instructional capacity, which, in turn, depends on both
individual and organizational learning in the school. Our account
points to a number of challenges to leaders and the leadership profes-
sion that deserve both further inquiry and action research.
NOTES
1. We define the classroom setting very broadly to include any activity organized by
the school and teachers to promote student learning. There is increasing evidence that
opportunities outside the physical boundaries of the classroom, such as service learning,
may provide important learning opportunities.
2. We emphasize race and class because the evidence of gender-based social repro-
duction effects in schooling, at least in the U.S. today, are more debatable.
3. “Academic press” denotes the extent to which school staff value and place empha-
sis on academic performance and goals.
4. We do not intend to imply that budgetary resources are not important, because
there is increasing evidence that even in a resource-rich environment like North Amer-
ica, they are. However, we have observed strong professional communities in settings in
districts with dramatic differences in per-student funding.
5. Organizational learning is thus related to theories of continuous improvement
(sometimes known as total quality management). Because it is assumed to emerge from
within the organization (even when it is in response to external demands), it is quite dis-
tinct from educational policies that emphasize systemic reform, standards based reform,
or other accountability-based and regulatory efforts to make schools function better.
SPILLANE AND SEASHORE LOUIS 101
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