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Faculty
Our faculty consistently challenges the status quo and pioneers new approaches to teaching and learning. Yet their ideas are rooted in research, practice, and policy. With deep knowledge of the education field, HGSE professors influence current conversations in the media, giving educators and students a much-needed voice for positive change.
"To really just focus on the phonics without having some continuous text that is meaningful is not necessarily going to come with the results that we want in terms of children who can read and who want to read."
"Almost all kids are morally literate. They know adults have values, but moral identity is the bigger thing. When parents expect something, when parents have high moral standards, such as helping neighbors, modeling fairness, these understandings are backed up."
"[Learning to read] is a long process with many milestones that unfold over many years, and it starts primarily with oral language. Years of brain development lead up to the point where formal instruction puts it all together and enables them to read. The process starts in utero."
"We have a science of reading. But now, we need a science of teaching reading that is equally well-developed if we want to support teachers optimally to do what they are trying to do in first- through sixth-grade classrooms."
"There are lingering effects of the pandemic in terms of absenteeism. The pre-pandemic evidence of the impact of absenteeism on achievement was strong — not just for the students who were absent, but for their classmates."
"Policymakers and educators have urgent work to do, as do parents who play an especially critical role in their children’s education."
"Every child has the right to learn to read, and reading is an essential part of our daily lives, and it’s really important for people’s economic outcomes and academic outcomes."
"By cultivating a small 'mentor pod' of peers who are also looking for work, you can help each other think creatively about your goals and job options, polish your materials together, and provide emotional support along the way — independent of whether you have access to a traditional mentor or not."
"At its heart, leading strategically is about anchoring in purpose; making choices about what to do, not do, and how; and then learning as you go."
"Advancing excellent teaching and learning in today’s climate depends on each of us doing the work we’re best positioned to do — with clarity, conviction, and one another."
"Super highly motivated students, they actually are more actively seeking out more challenging materials to learn. So the kind of opportunities provided by AI platforms do accelerate their learning. But for students who are less motivated, what we have seen is that AI actually might present as a shortcut for their learning.”
"We’re thinking about building a language and culture of power and building access for our students."
"Today’s most pressing problems — climate change, pandemics, migration, technological disruption, inequality, democratic decline — do not respect national borders. Global competence, comparative perspective, empathy, and creative problem-solving are necessities, not luxuries, for those preparing to lead."
"At the beginning of the pandemic, the Trump administration suspended all student loan payments, which made sense at that time. But that freeze kept getting extended by month, by month, year by year. So think of how many addresses change over four years and banking details and all that information that you need to have up to date in order to make sure the payments go through properly."
"An implication of this work was not only to develop early screening instruments to find kids at risk, but also to see whether we should change the way we teach math."
"Astonishingly, it’s a cross-partisan supermajority point of view that we should teach our kids a complete history — the good and the bad — and to be honest. And to support the development of reflective patriotism at the same time."
"It just takes more to educate kids who have significant challenges associated with poverty to a level we recognize as sufficient. We don’t want to reckon with it because of the cost."
"The need to improve reading instruction for students who are vulnerable for reading difficulties is not going away. We’re committed to finding ways to continue the work, but how that occurs is unclear."
"We live in a frightening world where things are coming apart. We don’t need to curate risk anymore. What we need to do is try to help kids understand, interpret, make sense, cohere, and stabilize during a very scary time."
"We’ve seen engagement is more about, let’s make families happy about our school, happy about our district, so that they support the things that we’re doing, but there’s no connection to engaging [parents] with what’s actually happening around student goals."
"Our findings suggest that some of these kids walk into their first day of kindergarten with their little backpacks and a less-optimal brain for learning to read, and that these differences in brain development start showing up in toddlerhood."
"This level of attack couldn’t gain the kind of momentum it has without the declining public support for higher education. It couldn’t have happened to this magnitude before, because there was a general sense that higher education was good for society."
"We in the education system have not really conveyed to families how important they are. We need to sit down with families and say, ‘We can’t actually do this job without you’."
"Subtract the full-paying international students from the applicant pool and an already fragile financial structure would begin very quickly to collapse."
"As universities cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset, they prepare students as change agents, equipped to navigate and resolve the complexities of our world."
“Perhaps our focus on performative actions has masked the degree to which those performances represent, however inadequately, deep commitments to shared values — to an effort to create a world in which words like ‘marginalized’ and ‘minoritized’ are no longer necessary.”
"I believe that all young people should have the opportunity to nurture their talents, that they should all be able to discover, and play, and learn and figure out who they are."
"These scholars bring fresh perspectives, problem-solving approaches and connections to global networks — cross-pollinating ideas that yield scientific breakthroughs and drive American competitiveness on the world stage."
"I was always in this, not because I’m into testing economic theories, but because I wanted to make the world better — to advance economic mobility."
"It's less about avoiding AI than uplifting conversational fluency. Conversation is underassessed [and] undervalued, in my opinion, and we can do more to elevate it."