Research Practice Partnership

Bridging the divide between rigorous academic research and classroom realities is pivotal in enhancing student outcomes and addressing educational disparities.

Evidence-Based Practices: Before scaling research initiatives, it's imperative to validate their quality and evidence-backed efficacy, ensuring they resonate with real-world educational challenges.
Human-Centric Approach: While technology offers valuable tools for education, the essence of learning lies in human interaction and relationships, reflecting the diverse cultural, racial, and linguistic backgrounds of students.
Collaborative Synergy: Effective integration of research into practice demands a cohesive collaboration across various stakeholders. This includes research expertise, policy and fiscal management, instructional leadership, and a deep understanding of the nuances of teacher work. Together, we can craft solutions that are both innovative and grounded in practicality.

I am committed to empowering educators and students with evidence-based practices for success.

Reading Ways
Open Implementation
Strategic Educational
Research Partnership
State-wide Networks

Transforming Secondary Literacy with Cutting-Edge Tools

Reading Ways revolutionizes literacy instruction in middle and high schools through the Literacy Resource Hub, a dynamic platform designed to empower educators and schools. This innovative hub provides research-based, adaptable resources that integrate seamlessly into any curriculum, enabling teachers to enhance student literacy in every subject area.

At the heart of the Hub is a research-enhanced AI assistant that supports local coaches by recommending tailored content area literacy strategies, facilitating the adaptation of resources, and providing implementation guides. This AI support empowers coaches to offer personalized guidance to teachers, helping them to effectively integrate literacy practices across disciplines like Math, Science, and History.

As Chair of the Research Advisory Board, I contribute to the development of these resources and support tools. Additionally, I have led an IES-funded  SBIR grant to further develop the Hub and extend its impact.

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Open Implementation

Open implementation is a partnership that focuses on building tools to understand and support the implementation of research-based practices. Our goals are to:

  • Improve access to research-based programs, pooling resources to support implementation.
  • Support implementation practices for schools and districts.
  • Collect and share data for ongoing iterative improvements of research-based programs.
  • Collect structured implementation data across programs to help districts and researchers compare results within and across programs and districts.
  • Use open-source projects and share code at https://github.com/OpenImplementation.
  • Share deidentified implementation data at https://osf.io/8gmwe/.
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Strategic Educational Research Partnership

I have had the opportunity to collaborate with the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP) on an IES funded randomized trial of the Word Generation program. Through sustained collaborations among researchers, practitioners, and designers, SERP generates innovative, scalable solutions to our schools' most pressing problems. Their work focuses on increasing equity, improving student learning, and giving teachers and students greater agency. I have been consistently impressed by the resources that SERP has produced for schools, including those to support adolescent literacy, and their innovative thinking about how research can be leveraged to improve schools.

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State-wide Networks

I believe that state and regional networks can play a critical role in translating research into practice, and my involvement in this endeavor began with an invitation to join an informal network in Ohio led by Rachel Daniel. We focused on examining research articles on adolescent literacy and their implications for Ohio schools, eventually growing in size and impact with support from State Support Team 3, resulting in a webinar series and close collaboration with regional and school leaders. Our work has been presented at the American Educational Research Association and the Literacy Research Association. Similar networks have since been established in other states, including Nevada, where regional leaders are now working directly with schools to scale research-based practices.

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Collaborators

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