I’m a Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University and Director of the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching (NCREST). My research includes studies of school improvement efforts at the school, district, and national levels. My latest book, The Education We Need for a Future We Can’t Predict (Corwin, 2021), focuses on efforts to create more powerful learning experiences both inside and outside schools in developed and developing contexts.
In 2010, I founded a twitter feed and blog, internationalednews.com, to provide access to news and research on educational policy and educational change around the world. Over the years, I’ve been involved in a variety of efforts to develop images of practice that take advantage of multimedia and the internet to document teachers’ expertise and build public understanding high quality teaching. I previously served as a Senior Scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching where I Co-Directed the K–12 Program of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) and established the Carnegie Knowledge Media Laboratory.
I began my career at Harvard Project Zero studying the development of children’s intellectual and social abilities and examining how educators were applying the theory of multiple intelligences in their schools and classrooms. His early career also included formative evaluations of the ATLAS Communities Project, one of the design teams funded by the New American Schools Development Corporation in the 1990’s to create “break the mold” K-12 school designs. My research and writing at that time focused particularly on the fragmentation and overload produced by multiple, conflicting reform initiatives and on the capacity building required to improve teaching and learning on a large scale. Following a year in Norway in 2009-10, I expanded my work to include comparative studies of accountability and school improvement policies in countries considered “higher” performing and “lower” performing on international tests. In 2015, I also launched a project to map the expertise, resources, and connections among programs working to improve K-3 reading outcomes in New York City public schools. Since 2008, I’ve also been a member of the design team of the New Jersey Network of Superintendents (NJNS).
My other books include Managing to Change: How Schools can Survive (and Sometimes Thrive) in Turbulent Times (with a website accompanying that book providing links to key ideas, references, and related resources); Into the Classroom: Developing the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning; Going Public with Our Teaching: An Anthology of Practice; and School Reform Behind the Scenes, a co-authored book documenting the work of the Coalition of Essential Schools, the School Development Program, Educational Development Center, and Harvard Project Zero, the participants in the ATLAS Communities Project.
Other publications include:
- External support providers, literacy, and the capacity for large-scale improvement (“The Role of External Support in Improving K-3 Reading Outcomes in New York City”)
- Superintendents, educational leadership, and equity (“Creating equitable outcomes in a segregated state“)
- The role of social networks in district-wide improvement efforts (“Instruction, equity, and social networks in district-wide improvement,” “Investigating the role of instructional rounds in the development of social networks and district-wide improvement”)
- The use of videos to help novice teachers bridge the gap between theory and practice (“Videos, pairs, and peers: What connects theory and practice in teacher education?”)
- What it takes to improve instruction and learning on a large-scale (“Innovation at the core”)
- Accountability and collective responsibility in Norway (“Building the capacity for collective responsibility in Norway,” “Beneath the surface of accountability”)
- An account of some of the factors and conditions that affected the progress from kindergarten to twelfth grade of 77,000 students who were part of the class of 2009 in New York City public schools (“The experience of one New York City High School Cohort”)
Contact Thomas Hatch at hatch@tc.edu.
Thomas Hatch 