David Eddy-Spicer is a professor of educational leadership in the Department of Leadership, Foundations and Social Policy at the Curry School of Education and Human Development, University of Virginia. He holds a doctorate in teaching and learning from Harvard University, where he served as research director of WIDE World, an online initiative that worked with K-12 school systems internationally to develop systemic capacity for deeper learning. He has served on the faculties of the University of Bath, UK, and the UCL Institute of Education, London.

He designs and teaches courses and workshops on improvement science and continuous improvement to aspiring and advanced educational leaders. He has designed and delivered professional learning on continuous improvement for system and school leaders in Virginia, Maryland, New York, and California, as well as in the UK and Europe.

At the University of Virginia, he leads UVA’s partnership with Chesterfield County Public Schools as part of the Carnegie Foundation’s iLEAD initiative. His primary research interests focus on the leadership of equity-oriented continuous improvement in K-12 schools and school systems, particularly organizational learning for redressing inequities in teaching and learning, developing collaborative capacity for effective problem-solving through interorganizational connections, and curricular coherence for powerful learning in leadership preparation programs.

He has expertise in program evaluation, case study research, realist evaluation, and the design and evaluation of professional learning environments. He serves on the Leadership Board of the Improvement Scholars Network and is co-editor of the SAGE Handbook of School Organization (2019) and a section editor of the forthcoming Foundational Handbook on Improvement Focused Educational Research, to be published by Rowman and Littlefield. He has published in a number of peer-reviewed journals, including Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education; Educational Management Administration and Leadership; Educational Review; Journal of Educational Change; Journal of Professional Capital and Community; Language and Education; Mind, Culture and Activity; and Pedagogies. He has authored or co-authored numerous book chapters and over three dozen text and multimedia case studies on the diffusion of innovation, professional learning, and organizational change in the public sector.