MSAN Design Team Member Bios

Mathematics

Eric Knuth, Associate Professor, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin. Eric's research concerns the meaningful engagement of students in mathematical practices and their development of increasingly more sophisticated ways of engaging in those practices. By mathematical practices, he refers specifically to activities such as communicating and justifying mathematical claims and using algebraic representations appropriately, flexibly, and efficiently to model and to solve problems.

Ken Koedinger, Professor, Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. Ken's research goal is to create educational technologies that dramatically increase student achievement. He creates "cognitive models", computer simulations of students thinking and learning, that are used to guide the design of educational materials, practices and technologies. These cognitive models provide the basis for an approach to educational technology called "Cognitive Tutors" in which he is able to create rich problem solving environments for students to work in and provide just-in-time learning assistance much like a good human tutor does. He has developed Cognitive Tutors for mathematics and science and has tested them in the laboratory and classroom.

Tom Romberg, Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin; former Director of the National Center for Improving Student Learning and Achievement in Mathematics and Science at WCER and Professor of Curriculum and Instruction (mathematics education). Tom has a long history of leadership of mathematics curriculum reform. His research has focused on young children's learning of initial mathematical concepts, methods of evaluating students and programs, and integrating research on teaching, curriculum, and student thinking.

Uri Treisman, Professor of Mathematics, University of Texas at Austin; Director of the Charles A Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin. His research and professional interests include mathematics and science education, education policy, and community service and volunteerism. Uri serves as the executive director of the Texas Center for Mathematics Educator Development and of the Texas Office for the Education of Homeless Youth and Children. He is a founding board member of AVID and of the National Center for Public Policy in Higher Education. Uri chairs the Chancellor's Advisory Board for Mathematics in NYC and the steering committee of the Urban Mathematics Leadership Network. He also serves as the Chief Juror for a Department of Defense-sponsored study of mobility in military families and its effects on their children's education. Uri is active in creating support structures for volunteer-based and community based organizations. He served as the vice-chair of the Governor's Commission for Volunteerism and Community Service under Governors Richards and Bush. In all his work, he is an advocate for equity and excellence in education for all children.

Academic Youth Development

Joshua Aronson, Associate Professor, Applied Psychology, New York University. Joshua Aronson is associate professor of developmental, social, and educational psychology at New York University. He received his Ph.D. in 1992 from Princeton University. Before coming to NYU, he taught and conducted research the University of Texas and at Stanford University. Aronson's research focuses on the social and psychological influences on academic achievement. Aronson is best known for his research on minority student achievement, research which offers a strong challenge to traditional, genetic explanations of why African Americans and Latinos perform less well on tests of intelligence than their White counterparts. Aronson and his colleagues' research on "stereotype threat" shows how stereotypes that allege lower ability among these groups depresses Black and Latino students' test and school performance and women's comfort and performance in advanced mathematics and science domains. He has authored numerous chapters and scholarly articles on this work and is the Editor of Improving Academic Achievement: Impact of Psychological Factors on Education (Academic Press). His current work focuses on why some students are more sensitive to teacher expectations than others and on methods of boosting the learning and test performance of underachieving youth. Aronson has received numerous awards and grants for his research including Early Career awards from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and the National Science Foundation, and the G. Stanley Hall Award from the American Psychological Association. His forthcoming book is called The Nurture of Intelligence.

Stacey Rosenkrantz Aronson, Research Fellow, the Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Stacey received her Ph.D. in psychology in 1995 from Stanford University and her B.A. in 1989 from Brown University. For the past decade, Stacey has worked at the intersection of research and practice, both conducting research and working directly with policymakers and practitioners to make research findings understandable and useful to those working with and for children. Her research focuses on child and family policy and education issues. She is currently working with the Dana Center to create and evaluate the Academic Youth Development (AYD) Initiative, a program designed to change the culture of the classroom into one of respectful engagement. Prior to the Dana Center, Stacey was a Policy Associate at the Southwest Educational Development Lab (SEDL), and taught at the LBJ School of Public Policy at the University of Texas. She then founded Bridges Consulting, a research agency focused on bridging the gap between research and practice.

Carol Dweck, Professor, Psychology Department, Stanford University. Carol's work spans social and developmental psychology and examines the self-conceptions people use to structure the self and guide their behavior. Her research looks at the origins of these self-conceptions, their role in motivation and self-regulation, and their impact on achievement and interpersonal processes.

Catherine Good, Professor, Psychology Department, Barnard College. Catherine's research focuses on the social forces that shape academic achievement, intellectual performance, motivation, and self-image. In particular, she studies not only how negative stereotypes contribute to females' underachievement and under-representation in math and science fields, but also methods of helping females overcome vulnerability to the stereotype. She also studies these issues as they relate to minority student achievement.

Andrew Elliot, Professor of Psychology, Department of Clinical and Social Psychology, University of Rochester. Andrew's primary focus of research is on the hierarchical model of approach and avoidance motivation. Andrew examines the antecedents, consequences, and development of achievement motivation and social motivation. He conducts basic, applied, and cross-cultural research in educational and sport contexts. Broadly speaking, his work focuses on the self, motivation, parenting, achievement, and social connection.

Ron Ferguson, Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard University. Ron is an economist and Senior Research Associate at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy and has taught at Harvard since 1983. His teaching and publications cover a variety of issues related to education and economic development. Much of his research since the mid-1990s has focused on racial achievement gaps, appearing in publications of the National Research Council, the Brookings Institution, and the U.S. Department of Education, in addition to various books and scholarly journals. He participates in a variety of consulting and policy advisory activities, including work with school districts on closing achievement gaps. He is the creator and Director of the Tripod Project for School Improvement and is also the Faculty Co-chair and Director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University.

Rochelle Gutierrez, Associate Professor, Curriculum & Instruction, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Rochelle's research focuses on equity in mathematics education, race/class/language issues in teaching and learning, effective teacher communities, and social justice. She has served as a member of the RAND National Mathematics Study Panel and the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Increasing Urban High School Students' Engagement and Motivation to Learn. Recently, she was a Fulbright scholar researching collective teacher practice among secondary mathematics teachers in Zacatecas, México. Before and throughout graduate school, she taught middle and high school mathematics to adolescents in East San José, California. Her work has been published in such journals as Mathematical Thinking and Learning, Journal of Curriculum Studies, American Educational Research Journal, and the Urban Review.

School Organization

John Diamond, Associate Professor of Education, Harvard University. John is a sociologist of education who focuses on how race, ethnicity, and social class intersect with school leadership, practices, and policies to shape the educational opportunities and outcomes of children. His recent research includes a four-year study of urban school leadership (The Distributed Leadership Study); an examination of the implications of social class for African-American parents' educational participation; a study of race, social class, and student achievement in suburban schools; and a study of the development and diffusion of teachers' expectations of students. For the last study, John was the recipient of a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship. In addition to the NAE/Spencer Fellowship, he has received research awards from the National Science Foundation and the American Educational Research Association/Institute for Education Sciences. He is currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Adam Gamoran, Professor of Sociology and Educational Policy Studies Research, University of Wisconsin; Director, Wisconsin Center for Education. Adam's areas of interest include the sociology of education, organizational analysis, and social stratification. His research interests include school organization, stratification and inequality in education, and resource allocation in school systems.

Jim Spillane, Professor, School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University. Jim's work explores the policy implementation process at the state, school district, school and classroom levels, focusing on intergovernmental relations and policy-practice relations. While building on the policy implementation research tradition, Jim has worked to develop a cognitive perspective on the implementation process, exploring the substantive ideas about reforming instruction that local policy-makers, both administrators and teachers, come to understand from state and national reforms. He is also interested in organizational leadership and change and is currently undertaking an empirical investigation of the practice of leadership in urban elementary schools that are working to improve mathematics, science and literacy instruction. In this work, Jim conceptualizes organizational leadership as a distributed practice involving formal and informal leaders, followers and a variety of organizational tools and artifacts.

Research Methods

Geoffrey Borman, Professor, Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, Educational Policy Studies, and Educational Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education. Trained as a quantitative methodologist at the University of Chicago, Geoffrey (Ph.D., 1997) is a Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Deputy Director of the University of Wisconsin's Pre-doctoral Interdisciplinary Research Training Program, a Senior Researcher with the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, and the lead analyst for the Center for Data-Driven Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University. Geoffrey's main substantive research interests revolve around social stratification and the ways in which educational policies and practices can help address and overcome inequality. His primary methodological interests include the synthesis of research evidence, the design of quasi-experimental and experimental studies of educational innovations, and the specification of school-effects models. Over the past seven years, Geoffrey has led or co-directed seven major randomized controlled trials of education interventions.

MSAN

Gloria Ladson Billings, Executive Director, MSAN; University of Wisconsin; Kellner Family Professor in Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; assumed the presidency of the 22,000-member American Educational Research Association (AERA). At the University of Wisconsin's School of Education, Dr. Ladson-Billings, who also serves as a project director at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER), has concentrated her research on multicultural education, social studies, critical race theory and education, and culturally relevant pedagogy. At WCER, she and colleagues developed Teach for Diversity, a graduate program for teachers who want to teach in diverse racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic settings.

School District Participants

Arlington School District

Pat Robertson, Supervisor, Mathematics. Mathematics Supervisor for the past six years. Prior to that, she was the Mathematics Teacher Specialist for four years. Her previous experience includes being an elementary teacher and a middle school mathematics teacher. She has taught graduate elementary, middle, and high school mathematics methods classes for George Mason University for the past fourteen years. She is currently co-teaching the courses in an MSP partnership grant with the University of Virginia that prepare Virginia middle school mathematics teachers to be highly qualified.

Kathy Wills, Director, Planning and Evaluation for the Arlington Public Schools for the past six years. Prior to that, she was in charge of the school system's testing program for 13 years. Before coming to Arlington, Dr. Wills was a gifted resource teacher in the Orange County (Florida) Public Schools. She has taught a variety of courses in gifted education including instructional methods, curriculum, identification, and counseling, as well as courses in student assessment. Dr. Wills has a Ph.D. in program evaluation from the University of Virginia and a master's degree in gifted education from the University of South Florida.

Evanston Township High School

Eugenia Brelias, Department Chair, Mathematics

Laura Cooper, Asst. Superintendent, Curriculum/Instruction; She has worked as a secondary teacher and administrator in urban and suburban districts in Arizona, Massachusetts, and Illinois, and directed the Institute for Learning and Teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. Her work has focused on changing classrooms and schools by valuing the craft knowledge of teachers and principals and by drawing on the research on teaching and learning. She helped to create the Minority Student Achievement Network, a national network of 25 school districts committed to eliminating the gap in achievement between white students and students of color, and she serves as the convener for the Research Practitioner Council of the Minority Student Achievement Network. She served as a member of the National Research Council's panel that designed the Strategic Education Research Partnership whose mission is to bring together researchers and practitioners to conduct research on the problems of practice. She has served on the SERP project in adolescent literacy and is helping to plan the SERP project in mathematics.

Rich Kaplan, Teacher, Mathematics, has taught Mathematics for 21 years at Lake View High School in the Chicago Public Schools (12 years) and at Evanston Township High School (9 years). He has developed programs at both schools which have significantly increased the numbers of African American and Latino students who take A.P. Calculus.

Evanston Elementary

Suzanne Farrand, Curriculum Coordinator, Mathematics; Suzanne Farrand has been the Curriculum Coordinator for math in School District 65, Evanston, since 2005. Before that, she was a math teacher in Evanston for 6 years. Her previous experience, for 20 years, was as an advertising executive in Chicago. She has raised two children in Evanston and, as a result, has a deep, personal connection with multicultural schools.

Sue Schultz, Assistant Superintendent, Curriculum

Lora Taira, Assistant Director, Information Services

Madison School District

Brian Sniff, Coordinator, Mathematics; Brian is in his first year as the Coordinator of Mathematics in Madison. For the past two years he served as a middle school math resource teacher whose work centered on the Math Masters Project. The Math Masters Project was a Title IIB partnership with the University to provide mathematics content-based professional development to middle school math teachers in Madison and nine surrounding districts. Prior to working that role, he was an 8th grade math teacher in the district and also has experience teaching high school mathematics outside of Madison.

Lisa Wachtel, Executive Director, Teaching and Learning; Lisa is the Executive Director of Teaching & Learning for the Madison Metropolitan School District. Previously, she was Science & Environmental Education Coordinator, K-12 Science Coordinator, and a Science Support Teacher. She is the Madison Center Director for the 4-year NSF project /Assessing Science Knowledge/, conducted at the Lawrence Hall of Science, Berkeley, CA. She has served as the president of the Wisconsin Science Education Leadership Association since 2002. Lisa received a B.S. in Biology and Ecology from UW-Oshkosh in 1982, a master's degree in Curriculum & Instruction from UW-Madison in 1990, and a Ph.D. from UW-Madison in Curriculum & Instruction in 1995, where her doctoral research analyzed expert teaching strategies and beliefs supporting multicultural science education.

Shaker Heights School District

Mark Freeman, Superintendent, Shaker Heights City School District since 1988. He joined the Shaker Heights faculty in1967 and has held senior administrative positions of increasing responsibility over the past 30 years. He holds a Ph.D. in Education with emphasis in Curriculum and Instruction from Kent State University.

Bernice Stokes, Executive Director, Elementary Education

Dale Whittington, Director, Research and Evaluation; she came to the District 7 years ago from John Carroll University, where she was an Associate Professor and Coordinator of Teacher Education. During her years in teacher education, she taught courses in research methods, evaluation, measurement, and educational psychology. For five years, she was Assistant Director of Research at Bellefaire/Children's Bureau, a mental health agency in the Cleveland area. Before moving to Cleveland, she worked for several years at the Educational Testing Service as an examiner and a program administrator. Her PhD is in psychology: measurement, evaluation and statistics.

James J. Paces, Executive Director of Curriculum (special observer for Design Mtg.) Jim Paces was formerly the Principal of Woodbury Junior High School in Shaker Heights and prior to that taught social studies at Worthington High School near Columbus, Ohio. Dr. Paces graduated from Bowling Green State University and earned his masters and doctorate from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was named a Jennings Scholar (Martha Holden Jennings Foundation) for exemplary teaching. Dr. Paces served as Principal of Woodbury when it was honored for excellence by the U. S. Department of Education. For 20 years he has been coordinating curriculum development efforts and concentrating on closing the academic achievement gap between African-American and white students in the Shaker schools.

SERP

Suzanne Donovan, founding Director of the SERP Institute. Previous to SERP's independence, she directed the SERP project at the National Academy of Sciences, and co-edited the two SERP reports: Strategic Education Research Partnership, and Learning and Instruction: A SERP Research Agenda. Between 2000 and 2005 she was study director for the National Research Council's How People Learn project, and co-edited two reports: How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice, and How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom. She was also study director and coeditor of Minority Students in Special and Gifted Education, and co-edited Eager to Learn: Educating our Preschoolers. Before moving to Washington, DC, she was on the faculty at Columbia University. She has a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of California, Berkeley.