Candice Bocala

Candice Bocala is a lecturer on education at HGSE. Her research focuses on the connections between educator learning and organizational conditions that support collaborative work. As a member of the Data Wise Project at HGSE, she co-chairs multiple Data Wise Institutes and is currently the director of Data Wise Research. In this role, she studies how schools and districts use data and continuous improvement to build equitable schools, and she integrates that knowledge into the design of practitioner-friendly tools and resources. She is the former faculty director of the Reimagining Integration: Diverse and Equitable Schools (RIDES) Project at HGSE. RIDES prepared leaders to help schools and districts foster strong academics and a sense of belonging for all students, a commitment to dismantling racism, and an appreciation of diversity. Additionally, she is a co-author of The Internal Coherence Framework: Supporting the Conditions for Continuous Improvement in Schools (Harvard Education Press, 2017), which introduces a set of clinical tools for school educators to coherently align resources and professional learning with their instructional vision.  

Bocala began her career as an elementary school teacher in Washington, D.C. She was also a senior research associate at WestEd, where she served as a researcher and technical assistance provider for federally funded national centers such as the Regional Educational Laboratory, Northeast and Islands (REL-NEI). As a program evaluator, she has led numerous formative and developmental evaluation projects that used a collaborative, participatory approach. 

Bocala received her Ed.D. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and she holds an M.A.T. in elementary education from American University, an M.A. in policy analysis and evaluation from Stanford University, and a B.A. in government from Cornell University.