What practices can school leaders adopt that are shown by research to improve student achievement? How can the nation's education system develop school leaders who use these best practices? A major new research study led by professor James Spillane will address these questions by investigating an approach to leadership development that centers on developing leadership practice in schools rather than focusing exclusively on school principals' knowledge and skills.
The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) recently awarded Spillane, with co-principal investigators Brian Junker of Carnegie-Mellon University and Richard Correnti of the University of Pittsburgh, a $3.3 million grant for their four-year research study called Learning Leadership: Kernel Routines for Instructional Improvement. IES is the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, dedicated to providing rigorous evidence on which to base education practice and policy.
This new project will evaluate whether the Learning Walk®, a structured "walk-through" routine for school leaders, can make a difference for urban schools. This school leadership routine, developed by the Institute for Learning at the University of Pittsburgh, involves conducting brief visits to classrooms on a regular basis for the purpose of observing classroom instruction.
Spillane considers the Learning Walk a "kernel routine" because it is an organizational routine that has the potential to create long-term transformation by seeding and propagating new professional activity. According to Spillane, a kernel routine is distinguished by its ability to redesign the school organization via leadership teams in the school. "Any kernel routine must be firmly anchored to the school's core work of classroom teaching and student learning and simultaneously linked to the school's prescribed curriculum," he says.
In fact, the researchers in Spillane's study will be looking for evidence of the impact of the Learning Walk on student achievement in reading, writing and mathematics. They will also be measuring its effect on school practice in the areas of collaboration, ability to critique classroom instruction, interaction among staff members, influence of staff on other staff, ties among staff, school norms, classroom instruction and academic rigor.
Focused on 80 Philadelphia elementary schools, the project is designed as an experimental study, with half the urban schools assigned to receive the Learning Walk routine and half assigned to conduct business as usual. Researchers will also conduct case study research in eight schools to explore the impact of the routine in more depth. In the Philadelphia school district where the research will be based, the majority of the students are poor and minority.
The Learning Walk is a highly structured set of activities for observing and interpreting teaching and learning. For each selected school, school leadership teams, comprised of the principal and three instructional leaders, will undergo training in how to conduct the walks and will conduct walks at least weekly.
Spillane is the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Professor in Learning and Organizational Change. He is a faculty member in both the Human Development and Social Policy and the Learning Sciences programs at the School of Education and Social Policy, as well as a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. Spillane's work explores the policy implementation process at the state, school district, school and classroom levels, focusing on intergovernmental relations and policy-practice relations. He is the author of several books including Distributed Leadership, Distributed Leadership in Practice and Standards Deviations: How Local Schools Misunderstand Policy.