James P. Spillane

James Spillane is the Spencer T. & Ann W. Olin Professor in Learning and Organizational Change at the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. He is also faculty associate at Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research. Spillane’s scholarship centers on issues of education policy, policy implementation, school reform, and school leadership. Spillane was among the first scholars to conceptualize organizational leadership as distributed practice. For nearly two decades he has continued to reveal how schooling institutions behave. His written scholarship has been instrumental in helping the field deepen its understanding of how organizational actors solve problems, the role of external policies in local school organizations, and how schools create practices, routines, and social relationships that allow sense making in matters large and small.