James P. Spillane – författare

What happens to federal and state policies as they move from legislative chambers to individual districts, schools, and, ultimately, classrooms? Although policy implementation is generally seen as an administrative problem, James Spillane reminds us that it is also a psychological problem. After intensively studying several school districts' responses to new statewide science and math teaching policies in the early 1990s, Spillane argues that administrators and teachers are inclined to assimilate new policies into current practices. As new programs are communicated through administrative levels, the understanding of them becomes increasingly distorted, no matter how sincerely the new ideas are endorsed. Such patterns of well-intentioned misunderstanding highlight the need for systematic training and continuing support for the local administrators and teachers who are entrusted with carrying out large-scale educational change, classroom by classroom.

James Spillane, the leading expert in Distributed Leadership, shows how leadership happens in everyday practices in schools, through formal routines and informal interactions. He examines the distribution of leadership among administrators, specialists, and teachers in the school, and explains the ways in which leadership practice is stretched over leaders, followers, and aspects of the situation, including routines and tools of various sorts in the organization such as memos, scheduling procedures, and evaluation protocols. This book is a volume in the Jossey-Bass Leadership Library in Education—a series designed to meet the demand for new ideas and insights about leadership in schools.

Distributed leadership has become an important term for educational policymakers, practitioners, and researchers in the United States and around the world, but there is much diversity in how the term is understood. Some use it as a synonym for democratic or participative leadership.This book examines what it means to take a distributed perspective based on extensive research and a rich theoretical perspective developed by experts in the field. Including numerous case studies of individual schools and providing empirically based accounts of school settings using a distributed perspective, this thorough volume: explores how a distributed perspective is different from other frameworks for thinking about leadership; provides clear examples of how taking a distributed perspective can help researchers understand and connect more directly to leadership practice; and, illustrates that the day-to-day practice of leadership is an important line of inquiry for scholars and those interested in improving school leadership.