Centre News

School Principal Forum
Engaging with the Real Challenges of Instructional Improvement in Schools

Around 100 principals and other educational leaders from 17 international and ESF schools, and more than 50 Hong Kong Primary, Secondary and Special Schools representing 32 school sponsoring bodies came together to discuss the latest research around school design and redesign. The Forum was held on May 29 in Tsim Sha Tsui.

The APCLC sponsored Forum was run by Professor James Spillane, one of the world’s preeminent thinkers in the area. James is the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Professor in Learning and Organizational Change at Northwestern University where he chairs the Human Development and Social Policy graduate programme. He is also a professor of Learning Sciences and Management and Organizations, a Faculty Associate at the Institute for Policy Research and Senior Research fellow of APCLC, HKIEd.

The Forum asked leaders to rethink the work of instructional improvement by helping them to focus on the educational infrastructure at the school and school systems levels. The Forum was designed to help participants challenge dominant notions of expertise and capacity and consider new distributed notions of expertise and instructional leadership and management. The principals discussed the essentials of a distributed perspective on expertise, engaged in applying the distributed perspective for diagnosis and design work in leading and managing instructional quality and improvement.