Mills Teacher Scholars Receives Prestigious Spencer Foundation Research Grant
We are thrilled to announce that the Spencer Foundation has awarded Mills Teacher Scholars’ Faculty Director Anna Richert and Senior Researcher Julie Nicholson a $50,000 research grant for their project entitled, “Making Thinking Visible: Documenting Teacher Leaders’ Facilitation of Evidence Informed Conversations about Students’ Learning in an Urban Elementary School.”
Their research, which focuses on the leadership of the Mills Teacher Scholars’ teacher leaders at New Highland Academy in Oakland Unified School District, will spotlight our emergent understandings about both teacher learning and teacher leadership in this time of nation-wide educational change.
In considering the impact of this work, Anna Richert reflects:
“What is so exciting about this grant is that the research will bring us to a deeper understanding of what successful teacher leaders do– what they know and believe that allows them to do those things– and what in the Mills Teacher Scholars model guides them to acquire that knowledge and skill base. Our project is especially timely as Oakland moves toward the Common Core and turns to its teachers for instructional leadership. It is gratifying to highlight and learn from the ground-breaking work going on at New Highland and in Oakland Unified–and share what we learn with a national audience.”
The Chicago based Spencer Foundation is dedicated to improving students’ lives and enriching society through cultivating new ideas in education, including research related to evidence based organizational and teacher learning. It distributes a limited number of highly competitive research grants each year.
