Donald J Peurach Editor & Author

Donald J. Peurach, University of Michigan professor of Educational Policy, Leadership, and Innovation, focuses his research, teaching, and outreach on the production, use, and management of knowledge in practice among social innovators and those they seek to serve. Peurach examines these issues in the context of large-scale educational improvement initiatives in public school districts and in school improvement networks, focusing continuous learning on improvement over time. With support from the National Science Foundation and the Spencer Foundation, he is collaborating with researchers from University of Michigan and Northwestern University to study efforts to redesign classrooms, schools, districts, and networks to function synergistically as instructionally-focused education systems. As a Senior Fellow of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, he collaborates with researchers and educational professionals to organize, expand, and advance the community of scholars engaged in the practice and study of improvement-focused educational research and practice.

Jennifer Lin Russell is professor of Learning Sciences and Policy, Research Scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center, and Associate Director for Educational Research and Practice at the University of Pittsburgh. She is also a fellow with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Her research examines policy and other educational improvement initiatives through an organizational perspective, and seeks to reshape the relationship between educational research and practice in order to accelerate improvement in the field. Her recent work examines two primary issues: (1) how schools create social and organizational structures that support reform; and (2) how inter-organizational collaborations can be structured for educational improvement.

Lora Cohen-Vogel is Frank A Daniels, Jr. Distinguished professor and Director of Interprofessional Education and Practice at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill School of Education. With a focus on domestic education policy, Cohen-Vogel is interested in identifying the programs and practices that are successfully raising schooling outcomes for traditionally underserved students in the United States. Cohen-Vogel is currently a co-principal investigator of the Early Learning Project at UNC-Chapel Hill, a $4 million grant from the Institute of Education Sciences. In that project, she leads a team that is examining how policy coherence (or lack thereof) may mediate the effect of high quality PreK experiences on children’s later life outcomes.

William R Penuel is professor of Educational Psychology, Learning Sciences and Human Development and Director of the National Center for Research in Policy and Practice at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as Principal Investigator at the Center for Education Policy Research, Harvard University. He works in partnership with school districts and state departments of education, and the research he conducts is in support of educational equity in three dimensions: (1) equitable implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards; (2) creating inclusive classroom cultures that attend to students’ affective experiences and where all students have authority for constructing knowledge together; and (3) connecting teaching to the interests, experiences, and identities of learners.