Born and raised in Chicago, IL, Tequila Butler has spent the last 7 years as a servant leader in schools across the DFW metroplex. In 2016, Tequila was awarded Teacher of the Year for her work in closing the achievement gap for students in Northeast Dallas. Tequila received her M.Ed in Urban Education at Southern Methodist University and a B.A. from Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University. In her spare time, Tequila enjoys giving back to the community through her sorority and local alumni chapter.

My research in mathematics education spreads over two areas: teacher education and equity in mathematics education. In particular my focus is on a socio-cultural approach to the mathematics education of ethnic and language minority students (school age and adults).

My overall research interest in teacher education is in the area of elementary teachers' (preservice and practicing) understanding of and beliefs about mathematics, its teaching and its learning.

I have taught precalculus, mathematics courses for business majors, and mathematics courses for elementary and secondary education majors, and for practicing teachers. My most frequent teaching assignment is mathematics teacher education courses. I have developed and taught several courses for practicing elementary and middle school teachers (algebra, geometry, and technology in mathematics teaching and learning). I also teach graduate level courses on research in mathematics education. I am particularly interested in participatory approaches to the teaching of mathematics. My teaching approach involves small group discussions, hands on activities, and use of technology.

Denise Collier has served public schools and students in Texas and across the nation for over 30 years. Collier served as members of the Council of the Great City School’s standards review committee and of the Department of Education’s No Child Left Behind technical advisory panel. At the state level, Collier led the development of a field guide for the New Visions for Public Education for the Texas Association of School Administrators and provides statewide training and support for TASA’s school transformation initiative.

Dr. Collier is a fellow with the Institute for Learning, supporting college-ready literacy efforts in Dallas public schools. She also serves as an adjunct professor in the doctoral program at Texas State University. Prior to her retirement, Denise served as the Chief Academic Officer and Deputy Superintendent of the Dallas Independent School District. Before joining Dallas ISD, she led curriculum and instruction programs in several other Texas districts, including Austin ISD, both long-term district partners with the IFL.

Bronwen Cowie is associate dean of Research in the Te Kura Toi Tangata Division of Education, The University of Waikato. Before she joined the university, she taught at a local secondary school.

Bronwen’s research is focused on classroom teaching and learning. She has a particular interest in assessment for learning that supports student agency. Working closely with teachers she has explored how culturally responsive pedagogy can be enacted in science classrooms where teacher practices include them inviting in and incorporating student and family funds of knowledge into the curriculum. Her work has also highlighted the role of teacher’s funds of knowledge and relationships alongside their pedagogical content knowledge. A current study is investigating the promise of place-based socio-scientific issues to attract student interest and foster their learning. This foci is complemented by a concern with the development of student "possible selves" which include their viewing science has a role in their everyday lives into the future.

Sara DeMartino joined the IFL in July of 2011 as a member of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career (PARCC) assessment prototype team. As a fellow, she works with educators in various school districts on research, curriculum development, and professional development. She is currently part of the Network for School Improvement grant team, collaborating with educators in Dallas ISD to study a problem of practice using improvement science methods.

Sara earned her PhD in Language, Literacy, and Culture at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include writing, peer review, and the use of technology in ELA classrooms. Sara’s most recent publications are “Secondary Students’ Perceptions of Peer Review of Writing,” published in Research in the Teaching of English, and “In Their Own Words” published in The Learning Professional. Sara is a co-author of the revised National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) position statement on the role of English teachers in educating English Language Learners, and the forthcoming NCTE position statement on adolescent literacy.

Joseph Dostilio is an instructional design fellow at the IFL, where he is a member of the mathematics team. He is involved in the writing and graphic design of lesson sets, units, and intervention materials, as well as development of training for mathematics coaches and teachers.

Dostilio started his teaching career in the Pittsburgh area, where he taught various high school courses. He became a curriculum writer for the Pittsburgh Public School District. He then accepted a position as a professional development content specialist for math and science with Pearson. There he designed professional development for middle school and high school teachers, coaches, and administrators, as well as online training modules for various curricula. He also has designed and supervised several afterschool and summer programs in the Pittsburgh area as well as at several universities. In addition, he has designed and taught several courses at The Pennsylvania State University for high school students preparing for college.

Dostilio holds a BA in Sociology from The Pennsylvania State University. He earned his Master of Arts in Secondary Education from Duquesne University.

Ryan Gallagher is a project director within the Center for Research on Equity and Innovation at the High Tech High Graduate School of Education. He coaches improvement science projects within High Tech High K–12 schools, co-facilitates a networked improvement community focused on college, career, and civic readiness, and directs the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) Early Implementation Initiative at High Tech High.

Gonzalez emigrated from the Dominican Republic to the United States at the age of 17. He went to New Brunswick High School, in the same building where he teaches at the New Brunswick Middle School. Teaching is a passion, as well as motivating students to be the best they can be. One of the best moments for Gonzalez is when a former student sends an invitation for their high school or college graduation. In his free time, he enjoys suspense movies, going to the park to appreciate nature, and playing the guitar.

Chief Hike-Hubbard is the lead architect of City Schools communications and engagement strategy, working to effectively engage families and communities in our work. One of her goals is to better shape and communicate our equity work, which must include families and communities.

Kristin Klingensmith, a mathematics fellow at the IFL, works directly with teachers, instructional coaching, and building and district leaders. She designs and delivers professional development and writes curriculum materials and performance-based assessments.

Klingensmith led the collaborative development of SOAR Intervention materials. She has collaborated with Paterson Public Schools (NJ) on grants from the Henry and Marilyn Taub Foundation, focusing on the development of materials to support conceptual mathematics instruction PreK through Grade 3.

Klingensmith started teaching in the Pittsburgh area. After several years in the classroom, she became Mathematics Coach in Wilkinsburg (PA) and later took on the position as Instructional Coach-Literacy for Propel EAST (PA). Kristin has also worked as a building principal, high school and K-8.

In addition to working in K-12 education, Klingensmith has taught undergraduate courses at community colleges in the Pittsburgh area and graduate classes at the University of Pittsburgh.

Kristin earned her BA in English Literature, with a certificate in Children's Literature, Master of Arts in Teaching, and Reading Specialist Certification from the University of Pittsburgh. Her certifications include Supervision of Curriculum & Instruction, Principal K-12, Reading Specialist K-12, Mid-Level Mathematics, and Elementary K-6.

Janise Lane is the executive director of Teaching and Learning at Baltimore City Schools. She supervises all core content areas, as well as the areas of early learning, differentiated learning, specialized learning, and instructional technology. Previously, Janise served the district as the director of literacy and as leader in the district’s school support networks.

Janise started her teaching career in elementary grades, focused primarily in Grade 1. Faced with the challenge of supporting struggling readers led her to New Zealand, where she spent two summers studying early literacy strategies used in the public education system there. Sharing the knowledge and experience she gained in New Zealand with her colleagues unlocked a new love for professional learning. She spent time teaching alternate certification literacy courses at the Urban Teacher Education Center at University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Dr. Virginia Loh-Hagan is the director of the APIDA (Asian Pacific Islander Desi American) Center at San Diego State University (SDSU). Previously, she directed the Liberal Studies program and served in various leadership roles in teacher education at SDSU’s College of Education. Prior to working at SDSU, she was a K-8 teacher. She has a B.A. in English and a Masters in Education from the University of Virginia. Upon graduation, she received the "Outstanding Woman Scholar in Education" award. She earned her Doctorate in Education with an emphasis in Literacy from SDSU-USD in May 2008; her dissertation was a qualitative study on the cultural authenticity of Asian-American children's literature. She is the 2016 recipient of California Reading Association’s Marcus Foster Memorial Award for outstanding achievement in reading. She’s the Cover Editor and Book Nook columnist for "The California Reader," the premiere professional journal for the California Reading Association. In addition to her academic publications, she has over 300 children's books and especially likes to write about her Chinese American heritage. She has given many presentations and trainings about Asian American issues.

Dr. Jamila Lyiscott aka, Dr. J, is an aspiring way-maker, a community-engaged scholar, nationally renowned speaker, and the author of Black Appetite. White Food: Issues of Race, Voice, and Justice Within and Beyond the Classroom. She currently serves as an assistant professor of Social Justice Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is the co-founder and co-director of the Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research. Dr. J is most well known for being featured on TED.com where her video, '3 Ways to Speak English,' has been viewed over 4.8 million times, and for her commissioned TED Talk, '2053' in response to the inauguration of the 45th occupant of the white house. She has delivered keynotes and workshops at 100s of institutions throughout the nation where she works closely with youth, educators, and communities towards racial healing, equity, and justice.

Dr. J's scholarship and activism work together to explore, assert, and defend the value of Black life globally. As a testament to her commitment to educational justice for youth of color, she is the founder and co-director of the Cyphers For Justice (CFJ) program, apprenticing NYC high school youth, incarcerated youth, and educators into research and activism through hip-hop, spoken word, and media literacy.

Dr. J serves as co-editor of the highly acclaimed journal of Equity & Excellence in Education, and holds faculty fellowships at the University of Notre Dame, and Teachers College, Columbia University. She is the recipient of the 2019 AERA Outstanding Public Communication of Education Research Award and the 2019 Scholar-Activist & Community Advocacy Award. In her active efforts to disrupt the bounds of the academy, she has also been featured in Spike Lee's "2 Fists Up," on NPR, Cosmopolitan, NowThis, and many other media outlets nationally and internationally.

Dana L. Mitra is professor of Education Policy Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She is founding editor of the International Journal of Student Voice and Co-Editor of The American Journal of Education. Dana also works as a leadership coach, as well as offering workshops and coaching faculty on Dana Mitra, Ph.D. A.C.C. writing productivity and moving through the tenure process.

Dana has published over 30 papers on the topics of student voice, civic engagement, and making a difference. She has a book coming out soon with Teacher’s College Press entitled The Empowered Professor: Breaking the Unspoken Codes of Inequity in Academia. The second edition of her textbook Educational Change and the Political Process will be published at the end of 2021 with Routledge. Previously books include Civic Education in the Elementary Grades: Promoting Engagement in an Era of Accountability and Student Voice in School Reform: Building Youth-Adult Partnerships That Strengthen Schools and Empower Youth.

Dana holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Educational Administration and Policy Analysis. She has served as a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar in 2012 to study child participation and educational reform in Bangalore, India. Her prior work experience includes teaching elementary school in the Washington, DC area and serving as the coordinator for two White House Conferences on Character Education.

Kari Nelsestuen founded Community Design Partners because she wants to help more organizations make lasting change within their communities, and because she loves the work. In her former work life, Kari researched and evaluated education initiatives. She learned how to ask great questions, synthesize information, and closely examine implementation. Some people say her superpower is making complex information accessible to everyone.

The wide world of facilitation, coaching, and improvement then beckoned to Kari. She has coached school leaders in the Stanford d.school School Retool program, helped improve the support model for education grants, facilitated workshops and retreats, and even co-authored some swell toolkits for improvement coaches. Kari prides herself on being flexible, humble, and, thanks to her grandmother, always on time.

Michelle Pledger is the director of Liberation at the Center for Research on Equity and Innovation, which brings together practitioners, researchers, and youth to address complex problems of practice in K-12 education and create more equitable, engaging learning environments for all students. She also co-directs the Share Your Learning Campaign which aims to spread student-centered practices (exhibitions, student led conferences, and presentations of learning) to 5 million students. As a faculty member at High Tech High’s Graduate School of Education, she co-teaches the Equity, Diversity, and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy course in the Teaching Apprentice Program, the Leading for Diversity, Equity, and Integration course in the Master’s Program. As a Freedom Facilitator, Dr. Pledger consults with organizations and districts who seek to liberate self, others, and systems.

She has been recognized as a Yale University Bouchet Graduate Honor Society member, a David L. Clark Scholar, a Billions Institute Fellow, a Chrispeels Doctoral Fellow, a Shoephlin Fellow, a recipient of the National Society of High School Scholars Higher Education Award, as well as the Inter-American Development Award. She holds an Ed.D. in Educational Leadership with an emphasis in social justice education through a joint doctoral program at the University of California, San Diego and California State University, San Marcos. Her research focused on cultivating culturally responsive teaching and classroom management self-efficacy in novice and veteran teachers for the purpose of improving academic opportunities and outcomes for culturally and linguistically diverse students.

She is committed to disrupting inequity in education and cultivating a community of practitioners who honor the lived experiences of all their students and educators. Whether it is through the vehicle of project based learning, culturally responsive-sustaining pedagogy, or freedom facilitation, her hope is to develop educators and students who think critically and act empathetically, and live a life of liberation.

Mark Ramirez is Dallas ISD's deputy chief of School Leadership, overseeing School Leadership B. Ramirez previously served as executive director in School Leadership. Prior to that, he was principal at Moisés E. Molina High School after a year as science coordinator at Harlingen CISD. Ramirez has served in a variety of roles in Dallas ISD since 1999, including as a bilingual teacher, science coach, and associate principal. He is also an adjunct professor at Dallas Baptist University. Ramirez has published two science books—Force and Motion and Energy All Around. He earned a bachelor’s degree in zoology from Texas Tech University, a master’s degree in educational leadership and policy studies from The University of Texas at Arlington, and a doctorate in education from Dallas Baptist University.

Cheryl Sandora, Ph.D., has been a research associate at the Learning Research & Development Center for 22 years. During her time at LRDC, Sandora worked closely with Dr. Isabel Beck and Dr. Margaret McKeown conducting classroom-based research on instructional practices targeted toward vocabulary and comprehension.

She began working as an ELA fellow for the IFL in 2014 and spends her time designing curricular materials and facilitating professional development workshops to districts throughout the country. Prior to her work at the University of Pittsburgh and the IFL, Sandora was a professor in the education department at Bethany College in Bethany, WV, where she taught ELA methods courses and was instrumental in designing courses for their newly created graduate school.

Sandora is the coauthor of Robust Comprehension Instruction with Questioning the Author: Fifteen Years Smarter with Isabel Beck and Margaret McKeown (in press).

Julie Smith is a connector of educators, government leaders, and community members, with the goal of shifting mindsets around improvement that are grounded in empathy & focused on systemic change. Julie works with organizations to build capacity for change from the inside out and believes that organizations can realize their goals when they build them with and for those they aim to serve. Julie has worked as a facilitator, advisor, and coach to a diverse range of projects including helping organizations implement equity frameworks, community-based solutions for schools, educator effectiveness systems, and designing state educator networks around continuous improvement.

Laurie Speranzo, a mathematics fellow for the IFL, works in districts with elementary and middle school math teachers, math supervisors, and math coaches. She designs and delivers professional development, and she writes curriculum materials.

Speranzo taught elementary and middle school grades for almost 10 years before she became a math coach in the New York City Public Schools, where she coached math and science teachers in pre-kindergarten through grade 12. Subsequently, she took a job with a math education non-profit based at Northeastern University that consulted to schools in the greater Boston area, where she coached math teachers; designed and presented math professional development for administrators, teachers, and after-school program coordinators; and taught graduate and undergraduate math content and methods classes. In recent years, Speranzo has presented at several regional and national conferences on math education.

As a contributor to an Institute of Education Sciences grant on coaching and an MSP grant on connections between math and science, Speranzo has continued to research and design lessons and tools around math coaching and cross-curricular teaching opportunities. She has also served on the editorial committee of NCTM’s Mathematic Teaching in the Middle School journal.

Guadalupe Valdés is the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education at Stanford University. She specializes in 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. She has carried out research in elementary, middle school, high school, and college leading to 6 books and over 90 articles. Her books Con Respeto (1996) and Learning and Not Learning English (2001) have been used in teacher preparation programs for many years. Two recent articles are "(Mis)educating the Children of Mexican-Origin People in the United States: The Challenge of Internal Language Borders" (2020) and "Analyzing the Curricularization of Language in Two-Way Immersion Education: Restating Two Cautionary Notes" (2018).

Rosa E. (Rosita) Apodaca is the executive director of the IFL. She served as a senior fellow at the IFL since 2002. Before joining the IFL, Apodaca held several cabinet-level posts in urban school districts where she designed, developed, and led award-winning efforts that raised the achievement of English learners in three large urban school districts. Apodaca received local, state, and national recognition for her work in the education of the most vulnerable students.

Her combined expertise developed as a senior district leader and as an IFL fellow positions the IFL to fulfill its significant contributions to schools while growing its national and international presence.

Apodaca’s life’s work has been to provide high-quality education to every student, particularly those traditionally under-served. Apodaca holds a master’s degree and a doctorate in Educational Leadership from Teachers College, Columbia University. She regularly tweets @Mita11Rosita.

Lindsay Clare Matsumura received her PhD in Developmental Studies from UCLA in 1998. In addition to serving as a co-director of the IFL, she is the associate dean of Research in the School of Education, a professor of Learning Sciences and Policy, and a research scientist at the LRDC. She has obtained multiple grants from the Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences to fund her research on teacher professional development, education technology, and literacy instruction and learning. Her recent work in these areas includes developing and studying an online literacy coaching system to increase the quality of reading comprehension instruction and learning, and an automated feedback system to improve students’ analytic text-based writing. Matsumura’s work has appeared in several scholarly and practitioner-oriented journals, and she has written a book for teachers based on her research on writing instruction.

Anthony Petrosky co-directs the Institute for Learning (IFL) with Chris Schunn and Lindsay Clare Matsumura at the Learning Research & Development Center (LRDC). He holds a joint appointment as a professor in the School of Education and the English Department, and was recently the associate dean in the School of Education at the University of Pittsburgh. He has worked with professional learning and curriculum development in English and literacy in public schools across the country. He led the development of assessment prototypes in English language arts and literacy for the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career (PARCC). He currently co-directs The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded IFL Network for School Improvement in partnership with 14 Dallas ISD schools, the Learning Research & Development Center, and the Center for Urban Education.

Christian Schunn obtained his PhD from Carnegie Mellon in 1995. He currently co-directs the Institute for Learning (IFL) with Lindsay Clare Matsumura and Anthony Petrosky. He is a senior scientist at the Learning Research & Development Center (LRDC) and a professor of Psychology, Learning Sciences and Policy, and Intelligent Systems at the University of Pittsburgh. Having obtained over $80M in federal grants, he has led many research and design projects in science, mathematics, engineering, technology, and writing education. Schunn's current research interests include STEM reasoning (particularly studying practicing scientists and engineers) and learning (developing and studying integrations of science and engineering or science and math), neuroscience of complex learning (in science and math), peer interaction and instruction (especially for writing instruction), and engagement and learning (especially in science). He is a fellow of several scientific societies (AAAS, APA, APS) as well as a fellow and executive member of the International Society for Design & Development in Education. He has served on two National Academy of Engineering committees-K-12 Engineering Education and K-12 Engineering Education Standards. Finally, he launched a startup called Peerceptiv that is based upon his research on technology-based peer assessment in high school and college settings.