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APCLC Leaders' Forum 2018
The Social Side of School Improvement


Prof. Jim Spillane conducted a Leaders' Forum on 'The Social Side of School Improvement' for the APCLC on March 16, 2018.
Details below:

Date: March 16, 2018 (Friday)
Time: 9:00am to 2:00pm
Venue: YMCA of Hong Kong

This Forum examined the social side of school improvement focusing on how schools and school systems can work to build social capital among their staff. Based on his recent research, Spillane examined how school systems design educational infrastructures to shape how teachers and school leaders interact about teaching and learning. He showed that these interactions are important to building social capital in schools and that this social capital in turn contributes to the development of new knowledge about teaching and learning that is essential for improving instruction. The Forum examined a) the components of educational infrastructure and how these components work to influence the development of social capital in schools; b) the nature of design thinking that is essential for building educational infrastructures; c) the dilemmas involved in implementing educational infrastructures that work.

About Jim Spillane
Jim P. Spillane is the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Professor in Learning and Organizational Change at the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. He is also professor of Human Development and Social Policy, professor of Learning Sciences, professor (by courtesy) of Management and Organizations, and faculty associate at Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research. Spillane has published extensively on issues of education policy, policy implementation, school reform, and school leadership. His work explores the policy implementation process at the state, district, school, and classroom levels, focusing on intergovernmental and policy-practice relations. He also studies organizational leadership and change, conceptualizing organizational leadership as a distributed practice. Recent projects include studies of relations between organizational infrastructure and instructional advice-seeking in schools and the socialization of new school principals. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Institute of Education Sciences, Spencer Foundation, Sherwood Foundation and Carnegie Corporation of New York. He has authored several books including Standards Deviation: How Local Schools Misunderstand Policy (Harvard University Press, 2004), Distributed Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2006), Distributed Leadership in Practice (Teachers College Press, 2011) Diagnosis and Design for School Improvement (Teachers College Press, 2011), and numerous journal articles and book chapters. In 2013, he was elected to the National Academy of Education and awarded the Ver Steeg Research Fellowship at Northwestern University.