Faculty Take the Field

In 2020, in a special issue of the magazine celebrating the school’s Centennial, we ran a story about how many of our professors come to the Ed School after working as teachers, principals, education policymakers, and school counselors, and now as Harvard faculty, they continue to collaborate with the field. It’s something that makes us “a different kind of ed school,” said Senior Lecturer Mandy Savitz-Romer, a former school counselor. “We have a sense of what the field needs.” And faculty are clear that collaborations are mutually beneficial, helping to shape and sharpen their research and what they bring back to their classrooms on Appian Way. 

There is no way to fully capture all of the work being done by our faculty members with schools and districts and NGOs and other universities around the world, so we decided to highlight examples of direct field work that haven’t previously been covered in the magazine.

FRAN PURCELL
SENIOR LECTURER; FACULTY DIRECTOR, ONLINE MASTER’S IN EDUCATION

Students at community colleges across Massachusetts can, in part, thank Fran Purcell for making cost and procedures better. Purcell serves on the Board of Trustees at North Shore Community College, where she chairs their student success committee. Recently, this included advocating on behalf of the recent statewide initiatives to provide free community college for students of any age and income level in Massachusetts who have not yet earned a bachelor’s degree. The work grew out of previous community college work she did as the associate commissioner for academic and P–16 policy at the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education. There, among other projects, Purcell spearheaded the creation and implementation of the statewide MassTransfer policy to streamline the transfer process and reduce the time and cost for community college students who transfer to four-year colleges and universities. This past December, Purcell also finished a project on behalf of the Ministry of Education in Rwanda called Reimagining Rwanda’s Higher Education Framework. There, she led a team that analyzed Rwanda’s regulatory and accreditation standards and processes to help improve the quality of the higher education system. Purcell also co-chairs the Nursing and Workforce Education Taskforce for the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education. 

Her why for staying in the field: “It’s important to me to stay connected to what community colleges do because these are the institutions that educate the greatest number of first-generation, low-income students, immigrants, adults, and others who are seeking to better their lives and their communities. Around 40% of undergraduates attend a community college, so in many ways, this is where the most impactful work in helping students access upward mobility takes place. As a first-gen student and daughter of working-class immigrants whose lives were transformed through higher education, I want to do my part to help others have these types of opportunities.” 

GRETCHEN BRION-MEISELS, ED.M.’11, ED.D.’13
SENIOR LECTURER; FACULTY CO-CHAIR, IDENTITY, POWER, AND JUSTICE IN EDUCATION CONCENTRATION 

Over the years, Gretchen Brion-Meisels has stayed connected to the field of education by working directly with schools, including offering workshops on research methods for young people and educators, supervising local interns, and writing or supporting the development of curriculum. More recently, she has been connecting to the field with students in her yearlong Ed School class, S501: Researching in Community. In the class, students learn about participatory research methods and develop activities and workshops to then teach these methods to young people. This year they partnered with teams of middle and high school students in Somerville and Boston, and with young adults on the other side of Massachusetts in the Berkshires. Each research team chose a question related to educational justice, developed a study design, collected data, and figured out action steps for improving their school or community. 

Her why for staying in the field: “I cannot imagine teaching at HGSE without working in the community at the same time, for so many reasons! First and foremost, I learn an incredible amount from youth and educators in the field. Particularly given the topics that I study — participatory action research, school culture/ climate, and anti-oppressive education — young people are often at the forefront of innovating and visioning. I find that working with students and educators gives me more energy. It reminds me of why I am doing the work, grounds me in the reality of everyday experiences in schools, and it motivates me to want to do better. Finally, I believe that the purpose of education is individual and collective transformation. Practicing what I teach helps me continue to grow and transform as a person; working on youth-run research teams helps us to continue to foster collective wellbeing in our communities. Connecting back to this purpose helps me stay grounded.” 

DREW ALLEN
SENIOR LECTURER; ASSOCIATE PROVOST, HARVARD UNIVERSITY 

Drew Allen’s work in the field is, more specifically, in the Yard. When Allen joined the Ed School in 2022 to teach, he also joined Harvard’s Office of the Provost as an associate provost for institutional research and analytics. In that role, he leads a team of 12 in the university’s central institutional research office, providing institutional data analysis and reporting. He also serves as the point person for Harvard’s institutional accreditation processes with the New England Commission of Higher Education and co-leads the university-wide data governance efforts, including supporting a community of “data stewards” across Harvard who are tasked with protecting data. Allen is also a reviewer for the New England Commission of Higher Education’s review process at other universities around the country. 

His why for staying in the field: “Being connected to the university as a leader of institutional research has been incredibly helpful in how I’ve delivered my courses, the content I’ve chosen to highlight, and the approach I’ve taken to advising and interacting with students. In my teaching and advising, I’ve always been eager to use real-world examples and challenging cases that I’ve faced in my administrative roles as opportunities to illustrate concepts, theories, and dilemmas students face in the classroom. As a professor teaching about higher ed, I am always engaging with current events, the latest research, and with student perspectives that emerge from classroom discussion and debate. New ideas and innovations are often explored in my courses, where students bring great ideas to the table. I also discover interesting ideas or interventions in preparing for classes that I like to share with my students. Being an administrator at Harvard means that I have a real-world laboratory to test out ideas that surface in the classroom. It also means that my class preparation, teaching, and advising is informed by the day-to-day experiences as a leader at Harvard.” 

SHAWN GINWRIGHT
PROFESSOR 

Shawn Ginwright has deep roots in the field of education, starting with the summer camp he created nearly three decades ago with his wife in San Diego. The camp was for young people of color suffering from persistent traumatic stress, meaning stress from growing up in toxic environments shaped by violence, systemic racism, and other factors. In 1991, he also co-founded Flourish Agenda, a national nonprofit research lab that provides professional development, training, and tools to educators around the country who are working with young people of color and helping them flourish using a healing-centered approach — an approach that views trauma not simply as an individual, isolated experience, but something that is collective. Ginwright is now working in two large school districts (Philadelphia and Boston) training teachers and young people in healing-centered engagement. He says the partnership in Boston began in 2024 after the Boston Health Commission’s Health of Boston 2024 Mental Health report found that the percentage of high school students in Boston Public Schools reporting persistent sadness climbed from 26.7% in 2015 to 43.9% in 2021. In response, the commission formed partnerships with organizations like Flourish Agenda to explore how healing-centered engagement through trauma-informed care could help students. In 2024, Flourish started working with 10 Boston schools to identify opportunities for innovation around care, identify social toxins to promote healing in school communities, provide technical assistance, and create opportunities for school staff to connect with one another to collaboratively create change. 

His why for staying in the field: “Working in the field is important to me because theory and practices need to be in constant conversation. My theorizing and research is based on what I learn from practice. My aim is to use theory to inform improvements in educational practice.” 

JON STAR, ED.M.’93
PROFESSOR 

Jon Star had been looking for an opportunity to get back into a math classroom for many years but had trouble squeezing it into his Ed School schedule. When a middle school in Watertown, Massachusetts, needed a parttime math teacher back in 2018 and was willing to work around his teaching duties at Harvard, Starr signed on. He now teaches one section of eighth grade algebra I every day, and he works twice a week with a small group of fifth-graders who need extra enrichment in math. He also attends department meetings and holds afterschool hours with students. And yes, he’s there for all of the parent-teacher conferences. 

His why for staying in the field: “There are many reasons why I pursued this opportunity, but first among them is that I really love teaching math! I love supporting my middle-schoolers as they make sense of math. But it is also the case that teaching middle school math helps me be better at every aspect of my Harvard job. It informs my research on students’ learning of math; it helps me think about how I can support novice teachers of math; it makes me a better teacher generally. I believe that all academics who study teaching and learning need to stay ‘fresh’ and up to date about the challenges that teachers face when teaching in schools. For me, teaching middle-schoolers using methods that I developed in my research lab has given me invaluable insights into the challenges teachers face in implementation. These learnings have both sparked new research projects and significantly changed how I work with preservice teachers. And finally, working in a local middle school gives me the opportunity to have a direct impact on children’s learning of math. While findings from my research have informed state and national curricular standards and have been embedded in some standards-aligned curriculum materials, the daily impact that I have on a small group of middle school children is particularly satisfying.” 

NANCY HILL
PROFESSOR 

Often, collaborations between researchers and those in the field start with a common interest. For Nancy Hill, her partnership with Medford (Massachusetts) Public Schools began when both groups wanted to figure out how to improve students’ engagement at school as well as their sense of belonging. The principal at Medford High believed that if he could figure out what he called the “school engagement and belonging gap” between students from different backgrounds, he could solve demographic gaps in achievement outcomes. He was interested in identifying practices that worked and wanted to create a research mindset among his faculty and staff. For seven years, Hill and her team helped the high school annually survey students, develop interventions, and work with teachers to better use data. Hill continued to collaborate with the principal after he moved on to other posts, and the research team continues to publish research findings from the data. Now, they are developing partnerships that mirror the partnership with Medford, including with schools in Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and China. And up until last year, students in Hill’s Ed School Adolescent Development course engaged in a “problem of practice” selected by Medford High School. The students met with faculty, students, staff, and families to figure out how each stakeholder understood or experienced the problem, and then students developed evidence-based recommendations for change. Findings were presented to members of the school community. 

Her why for staying in the field: “Working in partnership with schools and communities sharpens the research questions and helps ensure that we are asking the right questions. The ideal set of questions are ones that are immediately important and useful to the schools and agencies where we are working, while simultaneously having broader significance for theory-building and science. Working in partnership reduces the friction in the process of ‘translating’ research to practice.” 

ALEXIS REDDING, ED.M.’10, ED.D.’18
LECTURER; CO-CHAIR, HIGHER EDUCATION CONCENTRATION 

Alexis Redding teaches two courses that help students transition into careers that support college students. H205 lays the groundwork on student development (the “why”) and H205b focuses on how to put that all together (the “how”) and includes partnering with institutions to tackle a real-world challenge. Two recent collaborations were with Harvard College: a new training program for 200 pre-orientation student leaders that served 900 first-year students, and an initiative called Insight Spheres aimed at building a sense of community on campus for students. Recently, Redding also launched a new program focused on college student mental health through Professional Education at HGSE, giving her a chance to share many of the ideas from her classes with practitioners. 

Her why for staying in the field: “A priority for me is making sure that what we’re teaching in class is directly connected to what’s happening in the field right now, so I focus on ways that we can bridge that gap between research and real-world practice. Student affairs professionals are on the frontlines of creating a culture where students feel supported, safe, and have a sense of belonging — whether that’s through residence life, student organizations, advising, or crisis response. Now more than ever, we need student affairs leaders who are prepared to navigate those shifts with skill and empathy and a robust understanding of student development. It’s incredibly rewarding to help train the practitioners who are going to take on that challenge and create positive change at their schools. We now have ‘H205ers’ in student affairs roles at more than 150 high schools, colleges, and universities around the globe. It is incredible to watch how our H205 alumni take what they learned in the classroom and translate these ideas directly to their professional roles. Each year, we also have more than a dozen graduates return to speak and to serve as role mentors for our current cohort.” 

MANDY SAVITZ-ROMER
SENIOR LECTURER 

Mandy Savitz-Romer’s latest impact on the field of education came about because of something both tangible and less concrete: a book and word of mouth. At a national conference a few years ago, a presenter from the Illinois Student Assistance Commission spoke about how Savitz-Romer’s book, Ready Willing and Able, had transformed the state agency’s work, which is focused on helping Illinois students think through education beyond high school. In attendance was Bill DeBaun, a senior director at the National College Attainment Network (NCAN), a nonprofit that supports organizations and school districts that work directly with underrepresented students who aspire to go to college and succeed once they’re there. DeBaun left the session convinced that Savitz-Romer’s practical advice from the book would help his agency’s members better understand what drives students. The result: Savitz-Romer, a former school counselor with Boston Public Schools, is now partnering with NCAN, offering a webinar series, blog posts, and peer exchange drop-in sessions, covering topics such as how motivation shapes students’ college-going and the developmental milestones that all college access programs, K–12 school leaders, practitioners, and community partners should be aware of in their interactions with students. Currently, Savitz-Romer is also working on a national definition of college and career advising in partnership with CARA: College Access: Research and Action, a nonprofit that supports post-secondary access for first-generation college students, low-income students, and students of color in New York City. 

Her why for staying in the field: “I began my career as a practitioner and that continues to drive and inform my work as an academic. To carry out one’s work in the academy, it is crucial to engage deeply with the people, communities, and spaces that are engaged in practice in order to be respectful and reflective of the reality of the work we support.”