Shirley, Dennis
Dennis Shirley is Gabelli Faculty Fellow and Professor of Formative Education at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College. He has led and advised many educational change initiatives. He was the principal investigator of the Massachusetts Coalition for Teacher Quality and Student Achievement, a federally funded improvement network that united 18 urban schools, 7 higher education institutions, and 16 community-based organizations. He has conducted in-depth studies on school innovations in England, Germany, Canada, and South Korea. Dennis has been a visiting professor at Harvard University in the United States, at Venice International University in Italy, at the National Institute of Education in Singapore, at the University of Barcelona in Spain, and the University of Stavanger in Norway. He is a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, Germany. Dennis holds a doctorate in education from Harvard University.
Hargreaves, Andy
Andy Hargreaves is a research professor at Boston College and a visiting professor at the University of Ottawa. He is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Education. He is past president of the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement, adviser in education to the first minister of Scotland, and former adviser to the premier of Ontario. Andy is cofounder and president of the ARC Education Project: a group of nations committed to humanistic goals in education. Andy’s more than 30 books have attracted 8 Outstanding Writing Awards. He has been honored for services to public education and educational research in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Andy is ranked by Education Week among the top 20 scholars with most influence on U.S. education policy debate. In 2015, Boston College gave him its Excellence in Teaching With Technology Award. Andy’s most recent book is Leadership From the Middle: The Beating Heart of Educational Transformation.
The Age of Identity is the fifth book that Dennis and Andy have written together.
Andy Hargreaves is the Thomas More Brennan Chair in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. Prior to coming to Boston College, he taught primary school and lectured in several English universities, including Oxford. In addition, he was cofounder and director of the International Centre for Educational Change at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto. He has held numerous prestigious visiting professorships in Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Sweden, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Currently, he is the elected Visiting Professor at the Institute of Education in London. He has received the Whitworth Award for outstanding contributions to educational research in Canada and was awarded a writing residency at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy, by the Rockefeller Foundation.Andy is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Educational Change. He is leading editor of the first and second International Handbooks of Educational Change. His books have achieved outstanding writing awards from the American Educational Research Association, the American Libraries Association, and the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. His books have been translated into many languages. His most recent books are Sustainable Leadership (with Dean Fink, 2006), and Change Wars (with Michael Fullan, 2008). Andy presents to and consults widely with governments, foundations, teacher unions, administrator associations, and other groups across the world. His current research is on organizations that perform above expectations in education, health, business, and sport.
Dennis Shirley is professor at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. Shirley's educational work spans from the nitty-gritty micro-level of assisting beginning teachers in complex school environments to the macro-level of designing and guiding large-scale research and intervention projects for school districts, states, and networks. Shirley was the first US scholar to document the rise of community organizing as an educational change strategy, and his activities in this arena have led to multiple long-term collaborations and a steady stream of speaking engagements and visiting professorships in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Japan. Shirley publishes frequently in Educational Leadership, the Phi Delta Kappan, Teachers College Record, and Education Week. With colleague Andy Hargreaves, he recently conducted a study of over 300 secondary schools in the United Kingdom affiliated with the Raising Achievement Transforming Learning network of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust. In addition, Shirley and Hargreaves completed a study of the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement, a network sponsoring lateral learning within and across schools in the world’s second highest-achieving jurisdiction after Finland.Fluent in German, Shirley recently has spoken at and advised the Free University of Berlin, the University of Vienna, the University of Hildesheim, and the University of Dortmund on topics ranging from community engagement in schools to the reform of teacher education. At home in Boston, MA, Shirley is in the fourth year of leading a teacher inquiry seminar along with teacher leader Elizabeth MacDonald that is described in their recently published Teachers College Press book, The Mindful Teacher. Shirley has received numerous scholarly awards, including fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Bad Godesberg, Germany, and the Rockefeller Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. He holds a doctoral degree from Harvard University.
