School Improvement Processes and Practices: Professional Learning for Building Instructional Capacity

By James P. Spillane, Karen Seashore Louis. Teachers College Record, 2002

194 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 improvement, as well as a variety of interventions that focus on school improvement, 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 research 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 implicit or blurred. Our central task in this chapter is to develop a framework for making relations between the process and practice of school improvement and students’ opportunities to learn more explicit. Because classroom instruction is the proximal cause of students’ opportunities 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, adopting a “backward mapping” strategy (Elmore, 1979) we work backwards

Subfields: Education, Information Systems and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b3794356a0840258cc72a085ae1378fe0432ea99

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In Education

  1. P. Sammons
  2. Christopher W. Day
  3. G. Devos
  4. Viviane M. J. Robinson
  5. Melinda M. Mangin
  6. Deidre M. Le Fevre
  7. Bénédicte Vanblaere
  8. Jonathan W. P. Goh

In Information Systems and Management

  1. Deidre M. Le Fevre
  2. P. Sammons
  3. Christopher W. Day
  4. Catalina Lomos
  5. Bénédicte Vanblaere
  6. Jonathan W. P. Goh
  7. Roel Bosker
  8. Viviane M. J. Robinson

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