LECTURE 2
Educational Policy and Teaching Practice: Engaging the Challenge of Educational System Building
Speaker: Professor James Spillane
Northwestern University
Professor James Spillane looks at the relations between policy and teaching practice. Specifically, he examines the conditions that contribute to the successful implementation of policy, and how these enable teachers to transform their teaching practice and improve student opportunities to learn and develop.
Mapping backwards from the classroom to the school, and beyond to the community and educational sector, he identifies the necessary conditions to support teaching and its improvement at each level.
Professor Spillane argues that the marshaling and mobilizing of resources necessary to implement policy and enable improvement in teaching must be understood systemically - a systemwide challenge. This will involve designing educational infrastructures that support teaching practices and related practices that will improve it.
About the speaker
Professor James Spillane
Northwestern University
Professor James P. Spillane is the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Professor in Learning and Organizational Change at the School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University. A former primary school teacher from Ireland, Professor Spillane has published extensively on issues of education policy, policy implementation, school reform, and organizational leadership. His work explores the policy implementation process at the state, district, school, and classroom levels, focusing on intergovernmental and policy-practice relations. He is author of five books including Standards Deviations (Harvard University Press), and Distributed Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2006) as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. Recent projects include studies of relations between organizational infrastructure and instructional advice-seeking in schools and the socialization of new school principals. He has consulted widely with government and non-government agencies in the US and around the world. In recognition of his work, Professor Spillane was elected to the US National Academy of Education (2013) and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2020).
Discussion panel
Professor Allan Walker, Adjunct Chair Professor of EdUHK
Dr Darren Bryant, Associate Professor of EdUHK
Dr Qian Haiyan, Associate Professor of EdUHK
Dr Anissa Chan Wong Lai-kuen, S.B.S., M.H., J.P., Former Chairperson of Task Force on Review of School Curriculum, The Government of the HKSAR