Halverson Article Chosen for Journal of School Leadership Special Issue

March 16, 2015

Richard Halverson

Richard Halverson

A research paper co-authored by Richard Halverson has been chosen for the Journal on School Leadership’s 25th anniversary special issue.

Halverson’s paper, “The New Instructional Leadership: Creating Data-Driven Instructional Systems in Schools,” originally was published in the Journal on School Leadership (JSL) in 2007. In commemoration of the journal’s anniversary, its former editors selected articles that best captured the theory, empirical research and practice critical to their time, and then considered their implications on modern-day systems and scholarship.

Reid Prichett, Jeffrey Grigg and Chris Thomas – all members of UW-Madison’s Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the time – were Halverson’s co-authors on the paper, which reported on a WCER study that examined how educators use data to improve teaching and learning. (The group produced a 2005 WCER working paper as a draft of the 2007 JLS article).

The paper profiled the practices in four high-performing schools to identify common data-driven practices that included identifying relevant data; setting goals for improvement; using the data to align the instructional program; designing instructional innovations; setting up formative feedback cycles to determine the quality of local innovations; and preparing students to engage in testing.  Halverson and his colleagues found that leaders acted as data gatekeepers to reduce the amount of information processed by teachers, and that the responsibilities for coordinating data use are stretched across leaders in schools. 

Halverson’s work seeks to integrate how classical ideas of wisdom and practical knowledge can be used to understand the complex work of contemporary school leaders. He has developed research methods and theoretical frameworks to access, document and communicate the expertise of school leaders. Halverson is a principal investigator on the WCER projects “Tracking the Processes of Data Driven Decision Making in Higher Education” and the “Wisconsin Collaborative Education Research Network,” better known as the Network. He previously co-directed the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning (CALL) study to develop an online, 360-degree formative evaluation system for school leadership.

The JSL anniversary special issue will be published in May 2015.