Our Team

Caitlin Farrell is director of the Center for Reimagining Education Research (CRER). She specializes in research on policy implementation and K–12 educational reform, with a particular focus on organizational theory. She uses qualitative methods to explore the links between educational policy and the conditions that foster successful reform, e.g., examining evidence use at the classroom, school, and system levels and the implementation and effects of alternate governance structures, such as charter schools and charter management organizations. Prior to joining CRER, she served as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied research-practice partnerships between school districts and research organizations. Earlier, she was an elementary school teacher in the New York and Washington, DC public school systems. She holds a bachelor of arts from Dartmouth College, a master of science in teaching from Pace University, and a doctor of philosophy in urban education policy from the University of Southern California.

Alison Fox Resnick is a research associate for CRER at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her work aims to understand - and design for - how educational organizations and partnerships can enact systems and practices that support the full complexity of necessary learning for systems transformation. A central focus of her work is mathematics teacher learning and the design and implementation of research approaches, systems, roles, and tools to support transformation of educational practice. She works in partnership with both district and state leaders to co-design research-informed approaches to designing and implementing educator learning systems for mathematics instructional change and  co-authored a book with practitioner partners titled Learning Together: Organizing Schools for Teacher and Leader Learning. She lives in Ann Arbor, MI.

Bill Penuel is Distinguished Professor of Learning Sciences and Human Development in the School of Education and Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is also the founding Principal Investigator for the Center for Reimagining Education Research (formerly the National Center for Research in Policy and Practice). His research sits at the intersection of learning sciences and policy. He designs and studies curriculum materials, assessments, and professional learning experiences for teachers in STEM education, primarily in science. He also studies how contemplative practices and critical inquiry can support educators in cultivating more compassionate learning environments and schools. A third line of his research focuses on how long-term research-practice partnerships can be organized to address systemic inequities in education systems linked to race, gender and sexual diversity, and language.

He has authored two books on research-practice partnerships, Creating Research-Practice Partnerships in Education (Harvard Education Press, 2017), and Connecting Research and Practice for Educational Improvement (Routledge,2018) and co-edited a book on improvement research, The Foundational Handbook on Improvement Research in Education (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022).