Lsri Speaker Series - Audio

Abstract Recent policy demands for external accountability are challenging instructional leaders to rethink how they have traditionally guided the practices of teaching and learning in schools. I will discuss how a new conception of instructional leadership is emerging across the country that focuses on how local leaders and teachers build data-driven instructional systems (DDIS) in their schools. I will argue that a learning sciences perspective, grounded in distributed cognition and the situational distribution of leadership practice, provides a unique perspective for accessing and representing how school leaders are building socio-technical systems to facilitate information flows about student achievement in their schools. The DDIS model describes how leaders create and use artifacts to coordinate a series of organizational functions involving 1) data acquisition, 2) data reflection, 3) program alignment and integration, 4) instructional design, 5) formative feedback and 6) test preparation. To illustrate