Hill Promoted to Professor

Associate Professor Heather Hill has been promoted to full professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Hill’s primary work focuses on developing new measures of mathematics teaching quality, and using these measures to inform current policies and instructional improvement efforts. Hill joined the Ed School as an associate professor in 2007.

“Heather Hill is a scholar with an outstanding record of research, teaching, and practice, whose expertise bridges classroom practice, school- and district-level efforts to improve instruction, and policy issues related to schooling. Heather’s work is emblematic of what we at HGSE mean when we say that a faculty member works ’at the nexus of practice, policy and research,’” said Dean Kathleen McCartney. “She is an exceptionally incisive thinker engaged in state-of-the-art empirical research that is redefining the way we evaluate and understand effective math teaching. Heather has already contributed a great deal to the community through her work as the codirector of the National Center of Teacher Effectiveness. I am thrilled for Heather as well as for the school.”

Between 2000 and 2010, she and colleagues developed an assessment of teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT) as well as an observational instrument to evaluate the mathematical quality of instruction (MQI) within classrooms. She also studies instructional improvement efforts in mathematics and the role that language plays in the implementation of public policy.

Prior to joining HGSE, Hill spent seven years as a research scientist and then as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Education. She currently serves as codirector of the Ed School’s National Center for Teacher Effectiveness, and is the principal investigator on a large grant from the National Science Foundation through which she is investigating the effect of mathematical knowledge for teaching and instruction on student outcomes.

Hill holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan and a bachelor’s degree in political science from Swarthmore College.