Rebecca Givens Rolland

Rebecca Givens Rolland is a nationally-certified speech-language pathologist and professional development consultant. She has over fifteen years of experience working with children, families, educators, and clinicians. She is the author of The Art of Talking with Children (HarperOne, 2022), a book for educators and caregivers which has been translated into over eleven languages. She has a professional development book for early childhood teachers forthcoming from Brookes Publishing. Her research on classroom climate appeared in The Review of Educational Research. She also writes frequently for the popular press, with op-eds in The Hechinger Report, EdWeek, The Hill, and others, and writes a blog for Psychology Today. As a frequent lecturer and keynote speaker, she has given talks for EdCamp (Ukraine), Luminario (Peru), The Tokyo Association of International Preschools (Japan), and The Alliance for Early Childhood (USA).

As a founding module director in the Writing for the Public track at the Harvard Medical School's Effective Writing for Health Care program, she has designed and taught writing workshops for doctors, researchers, and journalists. She has served as an oral and written language specialist in the Neurology Department of Children's Hospital Boston, working as part of an interdisciplinary team to diagnose children with learning disabilities and provide recommendations for parents and schools. She also worked as the academic learning specialist at Kingsley Montessori School and as the project coordinator for the Rigorous and Regulated Learning Environment project.  At Harvard, she worked as a teaching fellow for a number of courses, including Reading Difficulties, Adolescent Literacy, and Adult Development. She has an Ed.D. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, an M.S. in speech-language pathology from the MGH Institute of Health Professions, an M.A. in English from Boston University, and a B.A. in English from Yale.