March 8, 2021
Dr. Beatriz Pont has worked on education policy reforms and school leadership internationally throughout her career. At the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills, she has launched and leads OECD countries schools policy education change and implementation support, and has worked with individual countries in their school improvement reform efforts. She also launched and led a comparative series on education reforms Education Policy Outlook, on school leadership, equity and quality in education and adult learning. Previously, Beatriz was researcher in the Economic and Social Council of the Government of Spain.
Beatriz holds a Phd in Political Science from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, a Masters in International Relations from Columbia University, and a BA in political science from Pitzer College, Claremont, California. She has been visiting researcher at LIEPP, Science Po, Paris and at the Institute of Social Sciences, Tokyo University. She is member of selected boards and has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Sheffield Hallam University. She teachers Comparative Education Policy at Sciences Po School of International Affairs, Paris.
Armand Doucet is a visionary, award-winning educator, social entrepreneur and business professional. A sought-after leader, inspirational speaker, author, columnist and blogger in multiple fields, Armand is also a two-time Ironman athlete and successful coach in many sports.
Eva Kyndt (PhD Educational Sciences) is an associate professor in human resource development and management at the Centre for the New Workforce (Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia) and Department for Training and Education Sciences (University of Antwerp, Belgium). The common thread in her research is the attention of the intersection between learning and working. She has a profound interest in sustainable careers and focuses on lifelong learning and wellbeing of (prospective) employees. Her research interests include preparing graduates for sustainable careers, social networks in organisations, wellbeing at work and workplace learning.
She currently acts as the coordinator of the Special Interest Group on Learning and Professional Development from the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI), is a member of MelNet – a Melbourne based consortium of social network experts – and member of the Emerging Field Group on mixed methods social network analysis from EARLI. Furthermore she sits on the editorial boards of Educational Research Review, Contemporary Educational Psychology, Vocations and Learning, and Human Resource Development International and will be the founding editor-in-chief of Elsevier’s new open-access journal Teaching and Teacher Education: Leadership and Professional Development to be launched in 2021.
March 9, 2021
Pak Tee Ng [National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University] is a Singaporean educator who is deeply involved in the development of school and teacher leaders. At the NIE, he previously served as Associate Dean Leadership Learning and Head of the Policy and Leadership Studies Academic Group. His main work is in educational change, policy and leadership.
Pak Tee has spoken at many global events, for example, Google Global Education Symposium, International Baccalaureate Global Conference, and Scottish Learning Festival. He is currently a member of Scotland’s International Council of Education Advisers and a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University.
Pak Tee has authored/co-authored numerous publications. International media often seek his views on education change. Having retired from journal editorship, he now serves as honorary mentor to a few younger editors. He is an editorial board member of several other international refereed journals. He is the co-editor of the Routledge Leading Change book series and the author of the book “Learning from Singapore: The Power of Paradoxes”.
Pak Tee encourages educators to walk a path not easily travelled, with love, courage and resilience. Although he is thankful for receiving a few awards during his career, his greater reward is a fraternity of students who are educational leaders themselves and who pay it forward through their educational leadership, contribution and commitment to education.
Pasi Sahlberg is a Professor of Education Policy and research director at the Gonski Institute, University of New South Wales in Sydney. He is a Finnish educator who has worked as schoolteacher, teacher educator, researcher, and policymaker in Finland and has advised national education reforms around the world. Pasi has held senior education expert posts in World Bank and European Commission, and leadership positions in the Finnish Government. He is a winner of several education awards, including Grawemeyer Award in the U.S. (2013) , Robert Owen Award in Scotland (2014), and Lego Prize in Denmark (2016). His recent book is Let the Children Play! Why more play will save our schools and help children thrive (with William Doyle, 2019) and Finnish Lessons 3.0: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland(2021). He lives in Sydney with his family.
Rachel Cowper has been at the forefront of putting innovative plans into effective action at Inspiring Scotland since 2009.
Rachel leads on the design and implementation of our outdoor learning and play fund Thrive Outdoors, promoting outdoor learning and increasing outdoor play opportunities for children throughout Scotland. Her experience in the sector has made her a leading voice in helping to change and shape attitudes towards outdoor learning and play at a national policy level and on the ground. Her work has led to international recognition and cooperation with similar programmes and leading academics in the field of physically activity and outdoor play.
Since joining Inspiring Scotland, she has worked across several funds and brings 20 years’ experience in business management and economic regeneration to help tackle deep social issues. Rachel is a long-standing volunteer in the charity sector and currently sits on the board of an outdoor activity charity.
March 17, 2021
Peter Tymms, PhD, is emeritus Professor of Education at Durham University, UK. He has published more than 100 scientific articles and his main research interests are monitoring, assessment, Rasch measurement, performance indicators, ADHD, reading and research methodology.
He originated the PIPS (Performance Indicators in Primary Schools) project, which is designed to monitor the affective and cognitive progress of children through elementary schools starting with a computer adaptive on-entry baseline assessment. It has been used with 5 million children worldwide and translated into several languages.
Peter Tymms was Director of the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring (CEM) until 2011 when he took over as Head of Department in the School of Education at Durham. At present he is devoting his time to setting up an international project designed to study children starting school around the world and creating agent based models for educational systems.
Alina Ivanova is a PhD candidate and research fellow at the Institute of Education, National Research University Higher School of Economics. Her research interests are in large-scale educational studies, as well as their psychometric underpinnings. And her current work explores the ways to ensure the comparability of assessment results of what children know and can do when they start schooling in different countries.
Georgeta Ion is a Professor of Educational Management and Organisation in the School of Educational Sciences at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona – UAB). She is also a researcher at the CRiEDO Research Centre (Centre for Studies and Research in Organisational Development). In the last years, she has held leadership roles, including Coordinator of the Teacher Education study programme and since 2020 Vice Dean of Students and Internationalisation at the UAB. She teaches subjects related to educational research and practice links, such as Innovation in Education at the Pedagogy Bachelor degree and Research, Innovation and Educational change at Educational Research Master programme. She has been a visiting research fellow at University of Helsinki (2013) and Trinity College Dublin (2016).
Her research topics are related to the study of Evidence-informed policy and practice in education and effective students’ assessment in Higher Education. In the last years, she conducted numerous studies examining school and HE teaching and learning improvement, student-teacher research competencies, and projects aimed at transformative research-informed educational innovations.
March 18, 2021
Nikita Pate is currently the Senior Mistress for A-Levels working with The City School network of schools. She has completed her MPhil in Leadership and Management from National Defence University, Islamabad. Her research thesis focused on The Importance of Organizational Mindfulness. She and her team drove the switch from face to face to online learning platform when the COVID-19 pandemic was its strongest in Pakistan. She is always working in the background and promoting her teachers, students and community and yet what she carried through was no mean feat by a female educational practitioner leader in the Global South. In a developing country like Pakistan, The City School Network made sure that they didn’t drop the quality of education being given to their students and encouraged their staff as they transferred online and literally learnt skills on-the-go. This school system has 160+ schools operating within Pakistan and some other countries in South Asia and is considered to be one of the best school systems in Pakistan.
Cynthia E. Coburn is Professor at the School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University. Coburn studies the relationship between instructional policy and teachers’ classroom practices in urban schools, the dynamics of school district policy making, and the relationship between research and practice for school improvement. She has won numerous awards for her scholarship, including the American Educational Research Association Early Career Award in 2011, election as a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association in 2015, an honorary doctorate (Doctor Honoris Causa) from CU Louvain in Belgium in 2019, election to the National Academy of Education in 2020, and Northwestern University’s prestigious Ver Steeg Distinguished Research Fellowship, also in 2020. She is a member of the California Collaborative for District Reform, the DREME network investigating coherence of early mathematics instruction, and the National Academy of Sciences, Medicine and Engineering Standing Committee on Scientific Communication. Coburn has a BA in philosophy from Oberlin College, and a MA in Sociology and a PhD in Education from Stanford University.