James Spillane

Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Chair in Learning and Organizational Change
Professor, School of Education and Social Policy
Faculty Associate, Institute for Policy Research,
Northwestern University
Director, Multidisciplinary Doctoral Program in Education Science
PhD, Curriculum, Teaching and Educational Policy,
Michigan State University, 1993
j-spillane@northwestern.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Additional biographical information

Downloadable Research Papers

James Spillane's work explores the policy implementation process at the state, school district, school, and classroom levels, focusing on issues that include intergovernmental relations and policy-practice relations. While building on the policy implementation research tradition, Spillane uses cognitive science research and research on teaching to frame his work. He has labored to develop a cognitive perspective on the implementation process, exploring the substantive ideas about reforming instruction that local policymakers (administrators and lead teachers) come to understand from state and national reforms.

Publications can be found in American Educational Research Journal, Cognition and Instruction, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Education Researcher, Journal of Curriculum Studies, Teacher's College Record, Educational Policy, Journal of Educational Policy, and Journal of Research on Science Teaching. He has served as associate editor of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis and serves on the editorial board of many journals including the Journal of Research on Science Teaching, Elementary School Journal, and Cognition and Instruction. He is author of Standards Deviation: How Local Schools Misunderstand Policy (Harvard University Press, 2004) and Distributed Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2006), and co-editor of Distributed Leadership in Practice with John Diamond of Harvard University (Teachers College Press, 2007). Spillane consults with numerous national and international agencies. He received a Fulbright Distinguished American Scholars Award from the New Zealand Fulbright Committee in 2002.

Spillane is principal investigator of the Distributed Leadership Studies, a program of research funded by the National Science Foundation, Institute for Education Sciences, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Spencer Foundation, which is undertaking empirical investigations of the practice of school leadership and management in urban elementary schools that are working to improve mathematics, science, and literacy instruction. In this work, Spillane conceptualizes organizational leadership from a distributed perspective, involving formal and informal leaders, followers, and a variety of taken for granted aspects of the organization including organizational routines and tools.

Current work included under the Distributed Leadership Studies include Spillane's work as principal investigator of the Distributed Leadership for Middle School Mathematics Education Study, a four-year research program designed to develop and validate instruments for identifying and measuring leadership and management of mathematics instruction. This work is supported by the National Science Foundation. Also, Spillane is co-principal investigator of Assessing the Impact of Principals' Professional Development, a randomized trial of the National Institute for School Leadership, a professional development program for school principals. The Institute for Education Sciences supports this research. He was also principal investigator of the Educational Excellence and Equity Study, which has received funding from the Searle Family Foundation.

Current Projects

Policy Implementation Process in Schools. Spillane is investigating local implementation of state and national educational reforms, as well as efforts at the school level to more tightly couple the institutional, administrative, and technical aspects of schooling. He has examined patterns of understanding in the ideas about school reform that implementers at the local government and school levels come to grasp from policy. Related work, with graduate student Corey Drake, examines the relations between teachers' life stage, career stage and response to instructional innovation.

Distributed Leadership Project. Spillane is principal investigator of this longitudinal study of urban school leadership funded by the National Science Foundation and the Spencer Foundation. It is designed to analyze the practice of school leadership in urban elementary schools. Building on theories of distributed cognition, the central goal of the project is to make the "black box" of the practice of school leadership more transparent by revealing and analyzing how leaders think and act to improve instruction in their school. The pilot phase of the study was completed in seven Chicago elementary schools in spring 1999. The project's research team, which included three postdoctoral fellows, six graduate students, and 10 undergraduates, gathered data through observations and interviews in 12 Chicago elementary schools. They are exploring the distribution of leadership among actors in the school and the extent and ways in which leadership is stretched over tools and physical materials (memos, scheduling procedures, evaluation protocols, and computer programs) in the organization.

Selected Publications

Books

Spillane, James and John B. Diamond (eds.). Distributed Leadership in Practice. Teachers College Press (2007).

Spillane, James. Distributed Leadership. Jossey-Bass (2006).

Spillane, James. Standards Deviation: How Local Schools Misunderstand Policy. Harvard University Press (2004).

Articles and Chapters

Spillane, J. and P. Burch. The institutional environment and instructional practice: Changing patterns of guidance and control in public schools. Forthcoming in The New Institutionalism in Education, ed. H. Meir and B. Rowan. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Spillane, J., B. Reiser, and L. Gomez. Policy implementation and cognition: The role of human, social, and distributed cognition in framing policy implementation. Forthcoming in New Directions in Educational Policy Implementation: Confronting Complexity, ed. M. Honig. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Coldren, A., and J. Spillane. Making connections to teaching practice: The role of boundary practices in instructional leadership. Forthcoming in Educational Policy.

Burch, P., and J. Spillane. From behind the front-lines: Middle managers and instructional reform in urban school districts. Under review by Educational Administration Quarterly.

Hayton, P., and J. Spillane. Professional community or communities? School subject matter and elementary school teachers' work environments. Under review by Educational Policy.

Spillane, J. 2005. Distributed leadership. The Educational Forum 69(2): 143-50.

Spillane, J. 2005. Primary school leadership practice: How the subject matters. School Leadership & Management 25(4): 383-97.

Loder, T., and J. Spillane. 2005. Is a principal still a teacher? Women administrators' accounts of role conflict in their transition to the principalship. School Leadership and Management 25(3): 263-79.

Diamond, J., and J. Spillane. 2004. High stakes accountability in urban elementary schools: Challenging or reproducing inequality? Teachers College Record 106(6): 1145-76.

Burch, P., and J. Spillane. 2004. How the subjects matter: Instructionally relevant policy in central office redesign. Journal of Education Change 5(4).

Diamond, J., A. Randolph, and J. Spillane, J. 2004. Teachers' expectations and sense of responsibility for student learning: The importance of race, class, and organizational habitus. Anthropology in Education Quarterly 35(1): 75-98.

Spillane, J., R. Halverson, and J. Diamond. 2004. Towards a theory of school leadership practice: Implications of a distributed perspective. Journal of Curriculum Studies 36(1): 3-34.

Spillane, J., J. Diamond, and L. Jita. 2003. Leading instruction: The distribution of leadership for instruction. Journal of Curriculum Studies 35(5).

Spillane, J., T. Hallett, and J. Diamond. 2003. Forms of capital and the construction of leadership: Instructional leadership in urban elementary schools. Sociology of Education 76(1): 1-17.

Downloadable Research Papers

Distributed Leadership: What's All the Hoopla?