Brown Bag Seminar: Using Professional Development to Create Equity and Teacher Leadership: A Canadian Story

Ann Lieberman, a senior scholar at SCOPE, will discuss her role in the Teacher Learning and Leadership Program, a collaboration between Canadian policymakers and practitioners to help teachers in Toronto write a proposal to do professional development in their own school (and beyond if possible). The program aims to support experienced teachers who undertake self-directed advanced professional development, develop teachers’ leadership skills for sharing professional learning, and facilitate knowledge exchange for sustainability of effective and innovative practices. For a more in-depth look at the program, Lieberman will share a study considering 2007-2011 cohorts of the program and vignettes written by teachers in the program. 

Ann Lieberman was previously a Senior Scholar at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and is Professor Emeritus of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Lieberman is widely known for her work in the areas of teacher leadership and development, collaborative research, networks and school-university partnerships, and the problems and prospects for understanding educational change.

Her latest book is Mentoring Teachers: Navigating the Real World Tensions (with S. Hanson and J. Gless). Her other books include Inside the National Writing Project: Connecting Network Learning and Classroom Teaching (with Diane Wood), Teachers: Transforming Their World and Their Work, and Teachers in Professional Learning Communities: Improving Teaching and Learning (with Lynne Miller). Lieberman has served on numerous national and international advisory boards, including those of the United Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association. She is also a past president of the American Educational Research Association. As a researcher she is currently working on deepening the field's understanding of different structures that support school reform including networks, partnerships and coalitions. She has recently been to Shanghai and Finland as a speaker and a learner.