Participants

 

Suzanne Donovan, SERP

Suzanne Donovan is the founding Executive Director of the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP), an education research, development, and implementation organization incubated at the National Academies. SERP brings educators, researchers, and designers into productive collaborations to find research-based, scalable, and sustainable solutions to critical problems of practice. SERP work spans content areas in K-12 education, including science, mathematics, content-area literacy, leadership, and school and district organization. SERP products are being used in all states and in many other countries. Formerly at the National Research Council, Suzanne directed numerous, high-profile education studies and has a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of California, Berkeley.

 

Catherine Snow, Harvard University

Catherine Snow, Patricia Albjerg Graham Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, carries out research on language and literacy development in monolingual and bilingual children. She chaired the committee that produced the National Research Council Report, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (1998), the RAND Reading Study Group that produced Reading for Understanding: Toward an R&D Program in Reading Comprehension (2002), and the National Research Council that produced Assessing Young Children: What, When and Why. She is a former president of the American Educational Research Association and a member of the National Academy of Education. Her research focuses on the social-interactive origins of language and literacy skills, the ways in which oral language skills relate to literacy learning, the literacy development of English Language Learners, and implications of research on language and literacy development for teacher preparation.

 

Renee Affolter, UMass Amherst

Renee Affolter is a doctoral candidate at UMass Amherst and helps lead the Vermont Science Initiative, a MSP funded program supporting K-12 teachers in improving science teaching and learning.  She is passionate about supporting teachers in leading academically productive talk in the science classroom.  She is also a lead facilitator and part of the Facilitator Pathway Design Team for the Next Generation Science Exemplar (NGSX) project where she is studying how to best support teacher leaders working as PD providers to bring productive talk to their fellow educators. Prior to working as a PD provider, Renee was a middle and high school science teacher in the Bay Area and in Vermont.

 

Shireen Al-Adeimi, Harvard University

Shireen Al-Adeimi is a doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is an instructor of two courses: Dimensions of Diversity: English Language Learners, and Literacy Instruction in Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Classrooms.

 

Courtney Cazden, Harvard University

Courtney Cazden is interested in the development of oral and written abilities and in the functions of language in school and community. A former primary-school teacher, she also has taught expository writing in an evening course for adults returning to college. Cazden was the recipient of a Fulbright research fellowship to study minority education in New Zealand. She also is a past president of the Council on Anthropology and Education and of the American Association for Applied Linguistics and has taught summer courses at the Bread Loaf School of English.

 

Richard Correnti, University of Pittsburgh

Richard Correnti is an Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Education. Dr. Correnti's research interests include how educational innovations influence teacher practice and how teacher practice influences student learning. He studies how policy and educational reform initiatives can improve instruction and student learning, and how these efforts are influenced by issues of implementation and scaling-up. He is the author of several recent papers on these issues, including papers appearing in the American Journal of Education, the Journal of Educational Psychology, and Reading Research Quarterly.

 

Phil Daro

Phil Daro served on the writing team of the mathematics Common Core State Standards. He continues to work on implementation and policy issues related to the Common Core. He is the lead designer, mathematics, for the pad based Common Core System of Courses developed by Pearson Education. He also works in a partnership of the University of California, Stanford and others with the Oakland and San Francisco Unified School Districts for the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP), with a focus on mathematics and science learning. Previously, Daro was a Senior Fellow for Mathematics for America's Choice, the executive director of the Public Forum on School Accountability, directed the New Standards Project, and managed research and development for the National Center on Education and the Economy. He has held leadership positions with the California Department of Education. He has also directed large scale teacher professional development programs for the University of California, including the California Mathematics Project and the American Mathematics Project.

 

Amy Dray, Spencer Foundation

Amy Dray is a Program Officer at the Spencer Foundation. Previously, she was a researcher in quantitative methods, evaluation, and assessment at the University of California, Berkeley. While at Berkeley she directed two research projects while continuing her own line of research and grant-writing. The first project, funded by the NSF, studied teacher practices in elementary mathematics. The second project, funded by IES, evaluated a reading comprehension intervention with struggling readers in middle and high school in San Diego. Amy received her doctoral and master's degrees from the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. Her doctoral research examined the connections between the social and academic competencies of children and adolescents. Prior to graduate school, Amy was a 6th grade math teacher and she also worked in the marketing and editorial departments of the College and School divisions of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publishers.

 

Leslie Duhaylongsod, Clark University

Leslie Duhaylongsod is a post-doctoral researcher at Clark University with the Next Generation Science Exemplar (NGSX) project. In collaboration with other NGSX researchers, she is developing a discourse coding tool that may be used by researchers, teacher educators, and teachers. The goal of the tool is to support K-12 science teachers as they facilitate knowledge-building discussions by helping them use talk moves in the service of three key science practices: modeling, argumentation and explanation. Leslie holds an Ed.D. in Human Development and Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Prior to beginning doctoral work, Leslie was a middle school teacher for nine years in the Bay Area, New Jersey, and Boston.

 

Perla Gámez, Loyola University Chicago

Dr. Perla B. Gámez leads a program of research focused on language development, particularly in children from homes in which English is not the primary language (Language Minority Learners; English Language Learners; Dual Language Learners). She is interested in how children's linguistic environments and experiences, at different developmental time points, help promote their language learning and development. Her current research examines how variations in the features of home and school language impact children’s language and literacy skills during preschool through adolescence. Her research employs both naturalistic observation and experimental techniques (i.e., syntactic priming paradigm).

 

Lynsey Gibbons, Boston University

Lynsey Gibbons’ research focuses on the challenge of reorganizing school- and district-level contexts to support teachers’ development of high quality instructional practices that are productive for student learning. Central to this effort is unpacking the roles of instructional leaders in supporting teachers’ development, and considering how to assist instructional leaders to organize their schools for learning. This work is informed by a vision of teaching mathematics that includes eliciting and building on children’s thinking as they attempt to solve challenging tasks, while holding children accountable to learning goals. She collaborates with a team of mathematics educators, practitioners, and leaders to design professional learning experiences for elementary mathematics teachers that support vibrant intellectual communities for both students and teachers. Prior to joining Boston University, Lynsey was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA. She worked as an elementary teacher and mathematics coach in Lexington, KY.

 

Pam Grossman, University of Pennsylvania

Pam Grossman joined Penn as the Dean of the Graduate School of Education in January 2015. A distinguished scholar, she came to Penn from Stanford University’s School of Education, where she was the Nomellini-Olivier Professor of Education. At Stanford she founded and led the Center to Support Excellence in Teaching and established the Hollyhock Fellowship for early career teachers in underserved schools. Before joining Stanford, she was the Boeing Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Washington. Dr. Grossman serves on the boards of some of the nation’s foremost organizations for promoting rigorous educational research and teacher excellence. She was elected to the National Academy of Education in 2009 and currently sits on the Academy’s Board of Directors. She is Vice Chair of the Spencer Foundation Board of Directors and is an incoming member of the Board of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. She also served as Member at Large and Vice President of the Division on Teaching and Teacher Education for the American Educational Research Association.

 

Magdalene Lampert

Magdalene Lampert currently consults with New Visions for Public Schools in New York City and the Education Division of WGBH to design teacher development that supports students’ achievement of the learning goals in the Common Core State Standards. She advised the Boston Plan for Excellence on adult learning systems in its Teaching Academies and on the design and development of the Boston Teacher Residency’s clinical teacher education/induction program from 2011 until 2016. From 2007 until 2011, she coordinated Learning Teaching in, from, and for Practice, a project for developing teacher education pedagogy across the University of Washington, the University of Michigan, and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Dr. Lampert has taught elementary and high school mathematics, pre-service and in-service teacher education, and doctoral courses for aspiring teacher educators. She is Professor Emerita in the University of Michigan School of Education, where she held the George Herbert Mead Chair in Education. She received the 2014 Outstanding Contribution to Education Award from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the 2014 AACTE Outstanding Journal of Teacher Education Article Award from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. She has been a member of the National Academy of Education since 1994 and was recently elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

 

Sarah Leibel, Harvard University

Sarah Leibel is a Lecturer on Education and Master Teacher in Residence in English Language Arts for the Harvard Teacher Fellows Program. Prior to coming to the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), Leibel was the Visiting Director of Elementary Education at Brown University. She earned both her M.A.T. in secondary English and her B.A. in comparative literature from Brown. She has served as a mentor teacher and methods instructor with the Brown Masters in Teaching Program, and has led professional development for new urban teachers. Her work as a teacher educator is informed by more than 15 years of work in public schools: teaching high school English Language Arts at a public urban charter school; teaching academic writing to predominantly first generation college students; administering a school-based mentoring program for high need middle school students; and leading outdoor adventures to connect children ages six through seventeen to farm, wilderness, and each other. Leibel's belief in the power of relationships, relevance and rigor guides her teaching practice at all levels. She is honored to be part of the founding faculty of the Harvard Teacher Fellows Program.

 

Eve Manz, Boston University

Eve Manz is Assistant Professor of Science Education at Boston University. Her research focuses on the development of epistemic practices in elementary school classrooms. She seeks to understand how to make practices such as modeling, argumentation, and experimentation sensible and meaningful for young students and their teachers. In her current research, she is exploring how to design new forms of productive uncertainty into learning environments in order to engender the surprise and variability in ideas that drive the development of practices in professional science communities. She draws from sociocultural theory and descriptions of scientists’ practice, then works closely with elementary teachers to test and refine tasks, discussion structures, and strategies for eliciting and responding to students’ ideas.

 

Sarah Michaels, Clark University

Professor Michaels holds a B.A. from Barnard College (1975), and an M.A. (1976) and Ph.D. (1981) in Education (Language and Literacy) from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to coming to Clark in 1990, Michaels served as Director of the Literacies Institute in Newton, MA, funded by the Mellon Foundation. She also directed projects on language and schooling with funding from the Spencer Foundation, Carnegie, and the Department of Education, while serving as a Research Associate and Instructor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has been the PI or Director of grants and programs (from foundations, state and federal agencies, and private donors). A sociolinguist by training, she has been actively involved in teaching and research in the area of language, culture, "multiliteracies," and the discourses of math and science. She was the founding Director of the Hiatt Center for Urban Education and works to bring together teacher education, educational research on classroom discourse, and district-based efforts at educational reform. She is currently the Senior Research Scholar of the Jacob Hiatt Center for Urban Education.

 

Karen Murphy, Penn State

Dr. Murphy’s research involves the investigation of processes underlying students’ abilities to read and understand text and content, to critically examine and evaluate the information presented, and to make reasoned judgments as a result of reading. Her ongoing projects pertain to the role of critical-analytic thinking in teaching and learning, promoting high-level comprehension and content area learning through classroom discussion in elementary language arts classrooms, and the use of discourse to enhance content learning and conceptual change in high school physics and chemistry classrooms. Her research is funded by both the Institute of Education Sciences and the National Science Foundation.

 

Cathy O’Connor, Boston University

Catherine O’Connor is Professor of Education and Linguistics at Boston University, and is Associate Dean for Faculty Development in the School of Education.  She has studied classroom discussion and academically productive talk by teachers and students for over 20 years.  She has focused especially on the role of talk in promoting student reasoning in literacy and mathematics learning in a variety of school settings. Current research includes a study of silent and vocal students’ learning during classroom discussion (to appear in Learning & Instruction). Practice-oriented publications include Classroom Discussions: a book, facilitator’s guide, and 5 hours of mathematics classroom video (Chapin & O’Connor & Anderson 2013).  Her research on classroom discourse has been supported by grants from the Spencer Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Another strand of her research centers on language description and documentation, including work on Northern Pomo, a dormant language of Northern California, and Medumba, a Grassfields language of Cameroon.  She recently received an NEH-NSF fellowship to prepare her Northern Pomo materials for archiving, and to create a website for community members to support revitalization efforts.

 

Jonathan Osborne, Stanford University

Jonathan Osborne is the Kamalachari Professor of Science Education. He started his career teaching high school physics in inner London before joining King’s College London in 1985, where he worked for 23 years. He became a full professor in 2000 and Head of the Department of Education in 2005. He then joined Stanford in 2009. During his career, he has been an advisor to the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee for their report on Science Education in 2002, President of the US National Association for Research in Science Teaching (2006-7), and has won the association’s award for the best research publication in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching in 2003 and 2004. He was a member of the US National Academies Panel that produced the new framework for the next generation standards in science in the US. Currently he is chair of the expert group responsible for producing the framework for the OECD PISA science assessments in 2015 and 2018. His research focuses on the teaching and learning of argumentation, how to teach literacy in science, and students’ attitudes towards science.

 

Abby Reisman, University of Pennsylvania

Reisman is an Assistant Professor of Teacher Education in the Teaching, Learning, and Leadership Division. Prior to her arrival at Penn GSE, Dr. Reisman was a visiting professor at Teachers College-Columbia University, and a researcher at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing at UCLA. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University, where she directed the “Reading Like a Historian” Project in San Francisco, the first extended history curriculum intervention in urban high schools. Dr. Reisman’s 2011 dissertation won the Larry Metcalf Award from the National Council for the Social Studies, and an article that emerged from it won the 2013 William Gilbert Award from the American Historical Association. She began her career in education as a classroom teacher in a small, progressive high school in New York City.

 

Alina Reznitskaya, Montclair State University

Alina Reznitskaya received her doctoral degree in Educational Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and did her post-doctoral research at Yale University. She teaches courses in educational psychology, quantitative research, and educational measurement. Alina’s research interests include 1) examining professional development interventions that help teachers facilitate class discussions to promote students' argumentation skills; 2) investigating the role social interaction plays in the development of argumentation skills; and 3) designing measurement instruments that can effectively measure argumentation skills in speaking, reading, and writing.

 

Emily Schwartz, SERP

Emily Schwartz is a Program Officer at SERP. She supports multiple projects, including a multi-site research study of Math learning, where she contributes to the design (both content and layout) of study materials and coordinates with staff in field district sites. Her work also includes analyzing and preparing grant tasks and activities, and conducting reviews of relevant literature to contribute to grant proposals. She also monitors SERP's social media presence and produces a weekly news digest on relevant education topics for all SERP employees and Board members. Emily has a Masters in Public Policy from Georgetown and a B.A. in Government from William and Mary.

 

Tina Seidel, Technical University of Munich

Professor Seidel is active in two research areas. The first area is instruction, with a focus on the video-based analysis of teacher-student interactions. The second area concentrates primarily on teachers. For this purpose, media-based tools are developed and tested with the aim of improving teacher training. The objective is to enhance understanding of learning-promoting teaching and effective teacher training.  After studying psychology at the University of Regensburg and Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tennessee), Professor Seidel was awarded a doctorate at the Institute for Science and Mathematics Education (IPN) in Kiel in 2002. She was appointed to the position of junior professor of teaching research in 2003. Prior to assuming the position of professor at TUM, she was a visiting professor at Stanford University (2005-2006) and held the Chair of Educational Psychology at the University of Jena (2007-2009). Professor Seidel is a member of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction and the American Educational Research Association. She has been a member of the Research Committee of the German University Rectors’ Conference since 2009.

 

Eric Shed, Harvard University

Eric H. Shed is lecturer on education and director of the Harvard Teacher Fellows Program. Prior to coming to HGSE, Shed was the director of secondary history/social studies education at Brown University. He received his Ph.D. in Curriculum and Teacher Education from Stanford University, and has also served as a methods instructor at New York University, and with the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP). His work as a teacher educator has been greatly informed by eight years of experience as a high school social studies teacher in three distinct types of urban schools: a small alternative high school, a large comprehensive high school, and an early college magnet school. From the Bronx to Harvard University, Shed's passion for helping struggling students become critical thinkers has been the driving force in his fifteen-year career as teacher and teacher educator.

 

Paola Uccelli, Harvard University

Paola Uccelli is associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. With a background in linguistics, she studies socio-cultural and individual differences in language and literacy development throughout the school years. Her research focuses on how different language skills (at the lexical, grammatical, and discourse levels) interact with each other to either promote or hinder advances in language expression and comprehension in monolingual and bilingual students. Uccelli's current projects focus on the design and validation of a research instrument to assess school-relevant language skills in elementary and middle school students and on describing individual trajectories of school-relevant language development in English- and Spanish-speaking students both in the U.S. and in several Latin American countries. Uccelli studied linguistics at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and subsequently earned her doctoral degree in Human Development and Psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

 

Andrea Wells, Clark University and Boston University

Andrea Wells is a PD facilitator and Research Associate in the Next Generation Science Exemplar (NGSX) project, as well as a research assistant for Dr. Eve Manz. Prior to this, Andrea was a Clinical Teacher Educator with Boston Teacher Residency for six years, where she taught the secondary science methods course and coached and supervised all science residents in their residency placements in the Boston Public Schools. She collaborated in the development of Clinical Teacher Education pedagogies that focused on residents learning in and from their classroom practice by connecting their teaching directly with student learning. In her work with the residents, she focused on teaching residents to use productive talk to support all students to build a deep understanding of science concepts. Her work as a teacher educator is informed by ten years of teaching secondary science in Chicago and the area. Andrea earned her M.Ed from HGSE in Mind, Brain, and Education.

 

Ian Wilkinson, Ohio State

Ian Wilkinson is Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at The Ohio State University. He has a background in educational psychology with special interests in cognition, instruction, and research methodology especially as they relate to the study of literacy. Originally from Australia, he has lectured and conducted research in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. His research focuses on school and classroom contexts for literacy learning and the cognitive consequences for students. He is currently conducting research on the impact of classroom talk on students' reading comprehension and argument literacy and the implications for professional development of teachers, funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.

 

Suzanne WIlson, University of Connecticut

Dr. Suzanne M. Wilson is a Neag Endowed Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Connecticut, where she currently serves as Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. Her undergraduate degree is in history and American Studies from Brown University; she also has a M.S. in Statistics and a Ph.D. in Psychological Studies in Education from Stanford University. She was a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University, where she served on the faculty for 26 years. Wilson also served as the first director of the Teacher Assessment Project (PI, Lee Shulman), which developed prototype assessments for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. While at Michigan State, Wilson collaborated on several large-scale research projects, including the National Center for Research on Teacher Education/Teacher Learning, the Educational Policy and Practice Study, and the National Partnership for Excellence and Accountability in Teaching.

 

Mark Windschitl, University of Washington

Mark Windschitl is a professor of Science Teaching and Learning at the University of Washington. His research interests deal with the early career development of science teachers—in particular their trajectories toward ambitious and equitable pedagogy. He is currently the PI on a multi-institutional NSF-funded grant to study the clinical experiences of teacher candidates, including the use of social networks to support their work in schools, and their opportunities to learn about students, teaching, planning, and assessment while in the field. Dr. Windschitl and colleague Angie Calabrese-Barton are authors of Rigor and Equity By Design: Seeking a Core of Practices for the Science Education Community, a chapter in the newest edition of the AERA Handbook of Research on Teaching.  He is the recipient of the 2002 AERA Presidential Award for Best Review of Research, and a member of the National Research Council Committee on Strengthening and Sustaining Teachers.

 

 

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