Printer-friendly versionInnovators, expert educators, advocates and researchers have joined The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to inform, design and stimulate the organization’s new program of work. This work embraces a new approach to education research and development and seeks to tackle some of the most nettlesome problems affecting the educational success of a large number of our nation’s students. The first problem the Foundation will address is around the extraordinarily high failure rates among students in developmental mathematics in community colleges.
Louis M. Gomez, the Faison Chair in Urban Education, University of Pittsburgh; Magdalene Lampert, the George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor in Education, University of Michigan; James W. Stigler, professor of psychology, University of California, Los Angeles; Uri Treisman, director of the Charles A Dana Center and professor of mathematics and public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin; and Guadalupe Valdés, the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education, Stanford University, are senior partners guiding the development of this new program agenda.
“With the help of these partners, each of whom brings expertise to the work, Carnegie will convene the right mix of practitioners, researchers, social entrepreneurs, policy makers, and other stakeholders—including students—to map the dimensions of a problem, identify promising solutions, and to advocate and support the efforts of a community engaged in continuous evidence-based improvement,” Carnegie President Anthony S. Bryk said. “These five partners will be integral to these efforts.
Gomez has worked with Bryk to develop a new approach to education research and development, Design-Educational Engineering-and Development (DEED). Isolated, short-term projects in a few sites must give way to longer-term, cooperative initiatives that move through repeated cycles of problem diagnosis, design, assessment, and redesign—a process carefully attuned to the variations among sites and circumstances in which improvements must take root. The DEED approach is based on the notion that it is not sufficient to know that a program or innovation can work. We need to know how to make it work reliably over many diverse contexts and situations.
Lampert's research has focused on understanding and portraying the world of classroom practice to the academic community, providing images of teaching practice that make the proposed reforms in mathematics education concrete, identifying elements of teaching that novices need to learn to do, and experimenting with interactive multimedia tools for both analyzing and representing the work of teaching. She is assisting the Foundation in focusing its attention on learning teaching, drawing from her current work investigating how teacher education can be structured to enable learning in, from, and for practice.
Stigler is best known for his observational work in classrooms, and has pioneered the use of multimedia technology for the study of classroom instruction. He has also championed the use of systematic Lesson Study as a mechanism for instructional improvement. Stigler is guiding an emerging center of activity at the Foundation called the Alpha labs. Alpha labs involve a small team of researchers and clinical practitioners working collaboratively on the same problem but in different locations. The senior researchers have responsibility for detailing the inquiry framework, raising supplemental support for the work, creating a collaborative space that encourages a broader network of participation over time, and overseeing the overall productivity of the lab.
Treisman's research and professional career has focused on reducing systemic inequities in access to high-quality instruction and, more broadly, to educational services. He brings his longstanding interests in strengthening mathematics instruction for disadvantaged students to the Foundation’s new priority on developmental mathematics education in community colleges. His critical work on translating social psychology findings into practice innovations that increase students' school success will influence the Foundation's efforts to develop a positive supportive experience for struggling developmental mathematics students. He is taking the lead in policy engagement at the state and national levels and working with individual institutions as they join Carnegie in doing the work.
Valdés specializes in language pedagogy and applied linguistics. Her work has focused on the English-Spanish bilingualism of Latinos in the United States and on discovering and describing how two languages are developed, used, and maintained by individuals who become bilingual in immigrant communities. As Carnegie begins its work on increasing the success of developmental mathematics students in community colleges, understanding the characteristics of the students is an important component. The Foundation recruited Valdés, who is one of the most eminent experts on Spanish-English bilingualism in the United States, to shed light on the teaching and learning challenges with this segment of the student population.
Founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1905 and chartered in 1906 by an act of Congress, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is an independent policy and research center. Its current mission is to support needed transformations in American education through tighter connections between teaching practice, evidence of student learning, the communication and use of this evidence, and structured opportunities to build knowledge.
