Published Research on the Mills Teacher Scholars Approach to Inquiry

Julie Nicholson and Anna Richert present their research findings at the Mills Teacher Scholars Teacher Inquiry in Action Forum

The Mills Teacher Scholars research team: Associate Professor of Practice, Julie Nicholson; Professor Anna Richert of Mills College at Northeastern University; and Assistant Professor of Education, Sarah Capitelli of USF are engaged in ongoing research (originally funded by the Spencer Foundation) around how the Mills Teacher Scholars program supports teacher learning.

The Winter 2016 issue of Teacher Education Quarterly features the article, “The affordances of using a Teacher Leadership Network to support leadership development: Creating collaborative thinking spaces to strengthen teachers’ skills in facilitating productive evidence informed conversations.”

This research contributes substantially to the field of teacher learning and leadership, documenting the skills and dispositions developed by participants in the Mills Teacher Scholar Leader Network:

“School reform policies and school administrators are increasingly positioning teacher leaders (TLs) with the responsibility to facilitate professional learning for their colleagues. Although ample evidence exists to suggest the need for facilitators to be highly skilled for teachers’ learning to be optimized, there is a dearth of research describing how TLs act as effective instructional leaders with their colleagues in professional learning communities (Nuermeski, 2012). Furthermore, no empirical studies have described effective models for supporting the leadership development of their TLs who are charged with learning to take on the role of instructional leader at their school sites. Our research intends to address this gap in the literature by documenting a teacher leader network (TLN) that is part of the Mills Teacher Scholars (MTS).”

An additional article, “Before productive evidence informed conversations can take place: Teacher leaders building foundations for teacher learning in one urban elementary school” will be published in an upcoming edition of the New Educator.