Professor of Education
Faculty Co-Chair, Learning Design, Innovation, and Technology (LDIT)
Degree: Ph.D., Harvard University, (2006)
Email: [javascript protected email address]
Phone: 617.495.3727
Vitae/CV: Jal Mehta.pdf
Office: Gutman 418
Office Hours Contact: Not available for appointments at this time
Faculty Coordinator: Cherise Kenner
Profile
Jal Mehta is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His research explores the role of different forms of knowledge in tackling major social and political problems, particularly problems of human improvement. He has also written extensively on what it would take to improve American education, with a particular focus on the professionalization of teaching.
Jal is the author of The Allure of Order: High Hopes, Dashed Expectations and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) and the co-editor of The Futures of School Reform (Cambridge: Harvard Education Press, 2012). He is currently working on two projects: In Search of Deeper Learning, a contemporary study of schools, systems, and nations that are seeking to produce ambitious instruction; and The Chastened Dream, a history of the effort to link social science with social policy to achieve social progress. He is co-editor of the Learning Deeply blog at Education Week, and in 2014 was the top-ranked junior faculty scholar in the Rick Hess Education Week rankings. He is also the winner of the Morningstar Teaching Award at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He was recently awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship and will be on sabbatical for the 2016-17 academic year.
Click here to see a full list of Jal Mehta's courses.
Sponsored Projects
The Deeper Learning Dozen: Developing a New Approach to Equitable and Humane Systems Change (2022-2025)
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
The Deeper Learning Dozen seeks to transform systems to support deep, powerful, and equitable learning for all students and adults. We sponsor a community of practice of 12 districts across North America (8 in the U.S., 4 in Canada), research and learn from those districts, and share our learning broadly. This proposal supports our next 3 years, during which we will: 1) deepen our work with our districts; 2) spread our work through workshops, engage with like-minded networks, and partner with complementary organizations; and, 3) share our learning more broadly through blogs, podcasts, articles, and a field-building book to capture our learnings about humane, relational, and equitable school transformation.
Deeper Learning Network/Initiative (2022-2023)
Stuart Foundation
The premise of the Deeper Learning Dozen is that there are lots of great classrooms, schools, extracurriculars, and youth development organizations that exhibit these qualities, but few, if any, whole systems that are committed to equitable, powerful, deep, learning for all students. The DLD community of practice brings together 12 districts in the US and Canada to reimagine schooling through three vital strands of the work that we consider to be critical for transformation: deeper learning, systems change, and equity.
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