Research Practitioner Partnerships are are collaborative, long-term relationships between researchers and practitioners, designed to improve problems of practice in education. They can be used to foster the research and development needed to bring computer science and computational thinking into schools. We are eager to have you join our team.
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Trish Dorr, Elementary Teacher, Ashland School District
Trish has been a teacher for 25 years, and has been at Helman Elementary in Ashland since 2008, mostly teaching 4th and 5th grades. She’s taught 1st grade through college, with a special interest in Environmental Education and getting kids outside. She wants more girls and women to feel confident within the fields of science and technology, and she coordinates opportunities for students in underrepresented populations through her work with student unions. One of her favorite things about teaching is the opportunity to build stronger community and connections through problem solving and play! She owns a shave ice company with her daughter, Alex, who is a constant source of inspiration. Alex will be leaving for college in August of 2023, leaving Trish with a strong need for things to do.
Dylana Garfas-Knowles, Elementary ELD Teacher, Ashland School District
Dylana has been teaching in the Ashland School District since 2012. During that time she has taught 4th grade, was a math specialist and is now the English Language Development (ELD) teacher. She loves her current position and is a strong advocate for English Language Learners (ELLs). When she’s not at school, Dylana loves spending time with her family and friends. They love the outdoors, especially sailing, skiing, rafting, camping and hiking.
Jill Hubbard, Program Coordinator and Senior Instructor of Computer Science, Oregon State University-Cascades
Jill Hubbard leverages her industry and education experience to bring accessible, inclusive, hands-on computer science learning opportunities to all students at Oregon State University-Cascades in beautiful Bend, Oregon. Hubbard earned her Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Boston University. Her industry experience includes designing and developing flight simulator subsystems for Evans & Sutherland Computer Corporation and developing video conferencing application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for Intel Corporation. Hubbard is co-PI for two National Science Foundation grants: CS for Oregon, a joint effort between OSU-Cascades, Portland State University and the University of Oregon, committed to preparing in-service and pre-service teachers, addressing problems of practice, and sustaining the growth of inclusive computer science in high schools throughout Oregon and Supporting Computational Thinking Across Grade Levels and Content Areas in K-5 Education, a joint effort between OSU-Cascades, Southern Oregon University, and William & Mary committed to integrating computational thinking across content areas in elementary classrooms.
Eping Hung, CS Instructor & Researcher, Southern Oregon University, Ashland School District and St. Mary's School
For the upcoming 2023-2024 school year, Eping will be a wandering CS nomad instructor: in the fall, he will be teaching 4th-8th graders at Willow Wind; in winter, he will be teaching 10th-12th graders at St. Mary's; and in the spring, he is planning to teach a CS course at SOU. Previously, Eping spent 15 years in industry as a software engineer and then 7 years as a CS instructor for 1st through 8th grades. He completed a masters in educational technology in 2021 through Michigan State University and then held a two-year position as a temporary adjunct in the CS department at SOU. With the upcoming teaching opportunity at St. Mary's, Eping will complete the trifecta of teaching at the primary, secondary, and undergraduate levels. Logically, he supposes the next step would be to teach CS to adult learners...or babies. He lives in Ashland with his physician wife, teenage daughter, and needy cat, where he enjoys outdoor running, indoor cooking, and everywhere streaming in his spare time. And once in a great while, when the stars are in alignment, he actually picks up a physical book to read.
Gladys Krause, Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education, William & Mary
Gladys is an assistant professor of Mathematics education at William & Mary. Her research centers on teacher knowledge and children’s mathematical thinking and how these two areas interact in classroom settings that involve multilingual and multicultural dynamics. Through her National Science Foundation (NSF) funded projects she has worked to conceptualize teacher knowledge of children’s mathematical thinking, situated in the practice of anticipating student strategies for fraction problems, and examined how teachers select numbers for problems to support fraction understanding. She has continued to expand on this work, extending it to work with bilingual parents and communities that supports the development of more equitable mathematics pedagogy. Gladys has also participated in the development of teacher and student assessments that involve articulating the knowledge to be assessed, identifying the kinds of evidence that demonstrate this knowledge, developing and refining potential items to elicit this evidence, and assembling the items into a complete assessment. She also has experience using large data sets to conduct computational and statistical analysis of teacher retention and has extensive experience teaching mathematics methods to bilingual pre-service teachers.
Jennifer Mohatt, Bilingual Immersion Elementary Teacher, Phoenix School District
Jennifer is a First-Grade Two-Way Bilingual Immersion (TWBI) Teacher at Phoenix Elementary School. Jennifer has 13 years of teaching experience primarily in Kindergarten and first-grades with 8 of those years teaching in the TWBI program at Phoenix Elementary School. Jennifer is dedicated to advocating for multilingual and multicultural teaching and learning and celebrating the diversity in the community alongside the students and families she works with. Jennifer enjoys her time outside of the classroom spent with her husband Brian and two daughters Maizie (13 years old) and Olivia (10 years old).
Eva Skuratowicz, Director of SOURCE, Southern Oregon University
Eva is a sociologist and is the director of the Southern Oregon University Research Center. She has been a passionate advocate for women in nontraditional occupations and her interest in studying women who enter computer science and engineering professions began in graduate school. Eva’s interest in finding ways to make those career pathways easier for all girls and for boys from underrepresented groups became one of the driving forces that initially brought the SOCS for All team together. For this project, she is providing research support.
Maggie Vanderberg, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Southern Oregon University
Maggie is passionate about increasing diversity in all STEM fields, especially computer science, and believes the best way to do so is through education. She spent over a decade studying computer science, earning her B.S. from James Madison University (in Virginia) and her M.S. and Ph.D. from West Virginia University before moving out west. Maggie has experience working in industry with Rosetta Stone, NASA, the DOE’s National Energy and Technology Laboratory, and the National Park Service as a software engineer, researcher, and project manager, but has been teaching university computer science courses full-time for the last 10 years. Her research efforts are focused on working with local school districts to integrate computational thinking into K-5 education as part of a National Science Foundation CSforAll grant. The goal is to introduce students to computational thinking so they are prepared to study computer science while progressing through K-12, and hopefully, eventually into her classroom!
Erin Henrick, President of Partner to Improve
Dr. Erin Henrick is an education researcher, evaluator, professional development provider, speaker, and author. Dr. Erin Henrick is a professional development facilitator for the Research+Practice Collaboratory and has facilitated over seven National Science Foundation CSforALL workshops, supporting teams of researchers and education practitioners to develop high functioning research-practice partnerships aimed at ensuring that all students in the United States have access to high quality computer science education. Dr. Erin Henrick has facilitated sessions for the Education Leadership Institute at Union University, focused on developing school leaders’ capacities to use continuous improvement methodologies and view improvement as an organizational issue that requires improvement across multiple layers of a system. Dr. Erin Henrick has also served as faculty for the Governor’s Academy for School Leadership at Vanderbilt University, leading sessions on parental engagement, improving instruction at scale, and improvement science. Dr. Erin Henrick also provides school improvement consulting services, and most recently has consulted with The Webb School, a private boarding college preparatory school in Bell Buckle, Tennessee. She also conducted an ½ day seminar for high school principals in Denmark on system-wide instructional improvement and was the invited speaker for a professional development retreat for over 150 teachers from the Silkeborg high school, the largest high school in Denmark.
Danny Schmidt, Research Analyst, Partner to Improve
Danny Schmidt, research analyst at Partner to Improve, received his MEd. from the University of Washington in Educational Policy, Organizations, and Leadership where his thesis investigated the usage and inequities in Seattle Public Schools’ intradistrict school choice policy. During his time in Seattle, Danny worked with the Office of Enrollment Planning to create public-facing interactive data visualizations in Tableau, bilingual informational materials for parents and guardians, and internal communication standards for potential school boundary changes. Before joining Partner To Improve, Danny worked on a research team investigating Networked Improvement Communities. Prior to graduate school, Danny spent his career working as an environmental educator in K12 settings in both the US and Mexico. He created bilingual educational materials for teachers and students, organized and led professional development trainings for teachers and school administrators, and taught thousands of students in hands-on outdoor classrooms.
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