Curriculum improvement does not happen through mandate alone — it requires leadership that builds shared ownership, develops professional capacity, and sustains change over time. EDD8514 develops the leadership knowledge and skills that enable curriculum and instructional leaders to lead improvement rather than merely manage it.
Professional leadership in curriculum and instruction
Leading curriculum work as a professional practice
- Instructional leadership: EDD8514 examines the instructional leadership model — the idea that an educational leader's primary responsibility is improving instruction — drawing on research from Philip Hallinger and others that demonstrates how leaders who focus on defining the school's mission, managing the instructional program, and promoting a positive school learning climate produce measurably better student outcomes than leaders who focus primarily on administrative management
- Distributed leadership: The course covers the distributed leadership perspective (Spillane, 2006) — the recognition that leadership for curriculum and instructional improvement is not concentrated in a single positional leader but distributed across multiple individuals (teachers, instructional coaches, department chairs, curriculum coordinators) whose leadership interactions constitute the actual leadership practice that shapes organizational outcomes
- Professional learning communities: EDD8514 examines the professional learning community (PLC) framework as a structure for collaborative curriculum and instructional leadership, drawing on DuFour, DuFour, and Eaker's work that defines PLCs through three big ideas: a focus on learning (not just teaching), a collaborative culture with collective responsibility for student success, and a results orientation that uses evidence to drive improvement decisions
Collaborative leadership for improvement
Curriculum and instructional improvement is inherently collaborative work — no individual leader possesses the full range of subject-matter expertise, pedagogical knowledge, and contextual understanding needed to design and implement curriculum improvements across an organization. EDD8514 develops competencies in facilitating collaborative curriculum development processes, including building trust among colleagues with different perspectives and expertise, managing the inevitable conflicts that arise when educators disagree about what should be taught and how, structuring collaborative work so that it produces genuine improvement rather than superficial compliance, and sustaining collaborative momentum over the extended timelines that meaningful curriculum improvement requires.
Leading change in curriculum practice
Curriculum improvement is organizational change, and EDD8514 connects curriculum leadership to the broader change leadership literature. The course draws on Michael Fullan's work on educational change — particularly his emphasis that successful change requires understanding both the technical dimensions (what needs to change in curriculum and instruction) and the social dimensions (how people experience change, why they resist it, and what supports their genuine engagement with new practices). The course also examines the specific challenges of leading curriculum change in organizations where teachers have significant professional autonomy, where "loose coupling" between policy decisions and classroom practice means that mandated curriculum changes may not translate into actual changes in what teachers do.
Building organizational capacity for curriculum improvement
Beyond leading specific curriculum improvement initiatives, EDD8514 develops the practitioner's understanding of how to build ongoing organizational capacity for curriculum improvement — creating the structures, cultures, and professional development systems that enable an organization to continuously improve its curriculum and instruction rather than depending on periodic, externally driven reform efforts. This includes developing teachers' curriculum leadership capacity, creating systems for ongoing curriculum review and revision, and building organizational cultures that treat curriculum as a living document subject to continuous improvement rather than a fixed product delivered from above.
EDD8514 assignments include leadership case analyses, collaborative improvement plans, and change leadership papers
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Frequently asked questions
James Spillane's distributed leadership framework, developed through his research at Northwestern University and published most comprehensively in Distributed Leadership (2006), fundamentally reframes how curriculum and instructional leaders should understand both what leadership is and who exercises it. Traditional leadership models tend to focus on individual positional leaders — the principal, the curriculum director, the department chair — and attribute organizational outcomes to the decisions and behaviors of these individual leaders. Spillane's framework argues that this individual-centered view systematically misunderstands how leadership actually operates in educational organizations: in practice, curriculum and instructional leadership is distributed across multiple individuals who interact with each other and with aspects of the organizational situation (routines, tools, structures) in ways that collectively constitute the leadership practice that shapes what happens in classrooms. This distributed view has several practical implications that EDD8514 develops. First, it means that the formal curriculum leader's job is not simply to make the right curriculum decisions and implement them, but to attend to how leadership practice is distributed across the organization — who is exercising leadership, how their interactions are structured, and whether the overall pattern of distributed leadership is producing coherent or contradictory curriculum direction. Second, it draws attention to the leadership contributions of people without formal leadership positions, particularly classroom teachers, whose instructional decisions collectively constitute the curriculum-as-enacted regardless of what the curriculum-as-written specifies. Third, it highlights the importance of tools and routines — lesson planning templates, curriculum mapping processes, assessment protocols, department meeting structures — as elements of the leadership situation that shape practice in ways that may be more consequential than any individual leader's direct interventions. For EDD8514 learners, the practical takeaway is that effective curriculum leadership requires a systems perspective: attending not just to curriculum content and design but to the organizational patterns through which curriculum decisions are made, communicated, implemented, evaluated, and revised — patterns that involve many people, not just the formal leader, and that are shaped by organizational structures and tools as much as by individual intentions.