W R Penuel
Biographic Data
| ID | 19042 |
|---|---|
| NAME | W R Penuel |
| GIVEN NAMES | W R |
| FAMILY NAME | Penuel |
| SIGNATURE | PENUEL W R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Colorado Boulder |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7096-6669 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 58 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 376 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 58 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Responsible Innovation in Designing AI for Education
Artificial intelligence (AI) in education is growing rapidly. Research has long played a role in developing knowledge of AI’s capabilities. Now is a critical time for investigating new approaches for design that center discussion of the purposes for AI in schools and that give youth, educators, and communities a say in those purposes. We argue for responsible and equitable design and development. We emphasize considering for whom AI is designed, …
From brief to boundary object
This paper introduces a framework aimed at designing equity-centered boundary infrastructure that supports learning at the intersection of research and practice. Drawing on sociocultural learning theory and influenced by a multi-district equity initiative, the framework outlines four interconnected design principles: contextual responsiveness, disruption of power dynamics, support for transformational learning, and attention to enactment. To demo…
Supporting a state in developing a working theory of improvement for promoting equity in science education
Introduction This study was undertaken to explore the potential of developing a working theory of improvement for creating a more equitable system of science education at the level of a US state. We ask: How can tools from a long-term research-practice partnership support a state team in initiating improvement research toward promoting a more equitable system of science education? Methods This design study took place in winter 2024 in a single st…
From judging to attuning
This article provides commentary for the special issue on culturally sustaining assessment. It highlights that the articles focus on transforming assessment from a focus on judgment to one of attunement—an orientation that sustains, rather than marginalizes, students’ cultural practices and identities. Across diverse contexts, the included articles propose both tactical and strategic shifts toward culturally sustaining assessment practices. These…
Socio-educational ecologies for learning, social change, and future thinking
Rapid societal and technological developments have transformed how people live and learn in and across different contexts, challenging the ways in which educational psychology has traditionally conceptualized and studied learning and development. These transformations are today exacerbated by the ongoing planetary crises of sustainability, structural inequalities, and threats to democracy, further challenging educational psychology's relevance fo…
Characterizing variations in the figured worlds of teachers and students in science class
This article explores the challenges of enacting reform‐oriented curriculum in science classrooms. We use the concept of figured worlds to analyze a case study of an eighth‐grade science class where the teacher reported that the students were resistant to changes she was trying to make. By examining stimulated recall interviews with the teacher (including the associated classroom episodes) and post‐unit interviews with a subset of the students, w…
Wallace Foundation Distinguished Lecture Education for Flourishing
In this article, I develop the idea that education can be organized for flourishing—that is, learning together how to act and engage with the world to create a more just, sustainable future for all. Flourishing is a collective process that involves cultivating care and compassion, engaging in dignity-affirming interactions, and repairing relationships among people, institutions, and subject matter. I share how three initiatives are working to bui…
Developing Science Classroom Expectations That Encourage Risk‐Taking for Learning Science Together
Reform‐oriented science classrooms encourage environments in which students engage in a collective enterprise of making sense of their science ideas together. Teachers who strive for these sorts of environments support students in collaboratively constructing and answering their own questions about phenomena and making sense of competing ideas together. However, to engage with one another productively, students must ask questions, share incomplet…
Studying the Implementation of Equity Projects in Science Education in Divisive Political Contexts
The implementation of equity‐oriented reforms is never simply a technical matter: it involves directly engaging with the norms and politics responsible for reproducing inequitable opportunities and outcomes, and with efforts to promote educational justice. To date, there has been little research on how leaders in science education navigate the political environments of schooling to engage in equity work in their local contexts. The current politi…
Humanizing Co-design through attention to educators’ affective and relational experiences
Background Co-design can be challenging and rewarding as educators explore new roles and ideas. Accounts of co-design rarely examine educators’ affective and relational experiences, nor investigate scaffolds for creating humanizing environments. We asked: How did affect and relationship show up in co-design for educators?, How did the affirmation of affect and relationship in the co-design process support the movement of ideas and practices acros…
The role of equitable classroom cultures for supporting interest in science
Supporting student interest in science is critical for broadening participation in the field because interest, even more than achievement, is associated with pursuing future science education and careers. In this study, we explore the conjecture that equitable classroom cultures can support interest in science. Specifically, we examine the idea that science classroom cultures that equitably reflect collective enterprise (where students engage col…
Belonging in science classrooms
Meaningful participation in science and engineering practices requires that students make their thinking visible to others and build on one another's ideas. But sharing ideas with others in small groups and classrooms carries social risk, particularly for students from nondominant groups and communities. In this paper, we explore how students' perceptions of classrooms shape their contributions to classroom knowledge building in science across a …
Dignity-Affirming Care in Research-Practice Partnerships
Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) have the potential to affirm the dignity of participants through caring interactions, which support good relationships. A key ethical principle to guide the cultivation of good relationships in an RPP is a quality of relating that we call dignity-affirming care. We define dignity-affirming care as speech, actions, and dispositions that demonstrate concern for another and their expressed needs and goals in a m…
The adventures of John Bransford
Conceptions and Practices of Equity in Research-Practice Partnerships
This framework explores the plurality of ways that research-practice partnerships (RPPs) conceptualize issues of equity, and with what consequences for what gets studied, whose voices are included in inquiry, and what knowledge is foregrounded in partnership activity. We draw on institutional theory and the perspectives of members from diverse partnerships to create a framework on the beliefs and practices of equity in RPPs. In terms of their mis…
Characterizing relationships between collective enterprise and student epistemic agency in science
DATA S1. Supporting Information TABLE S1. Students' ideas for investigating air and water molecules Please note: The publisher is not responsible for the content or functionality of any supporting information supplied by the authors. Any queries (other than missing content) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article
Considerations to engage a funds of identity approach as a vehicle toward epistemic justice in educational settings
“They were learning from us as we were learning from them”
This paper explores participants' perspectives of how they experienced a co-design workshop focused on developing a storyline unit where students can explore foundational concepts of AI. We structured a co-design space: (1) to create opportunities for intergenerational collaboration among educators and young learners; (2) to develop critical perspectives and understanding of AI during co-design. An interview analysis examined what participants va…
Algunos principios de aprendizaje equitativo post-pandemia
En este artículo se introducen e ilustran seis principios acordes con el aprendizaje equitativo. Dichos principios fueron sugeridos por un grupo de investigadores y profesores durante la primavera del año 2020, reunidos por la Fundación Spencer y el Learning Policy Institute, con el objetivo de orientar al cuerpo docente en relación a una visión propositiva de lo que podríamos llamar “educación post-pandemia”. Los principios son: (1) centrarse en…
Learning at the Boundaries of Research and Practice
Given the rapid growth of research–practice partnerships (RPPs), we need a framework that helps the field understand how RPPs can facilitate organizational learning in service of local educational improvement and transformation. Drawing on sociocultural and organizational learning theories, we argue that learning can happen for the organizations engaged in RPPs at the boundaries of research and practice. Such learning is evident when there are ch…
Storyline Units
The vision of the Framework and NGSS requires important shifts in teaching approaches and instructional materials. We argue that this commitment to engaging learners in meaningful practice and supporting students’ epistemic agency entails that we support coherence from the students’ perspective. This coherence arises when students see their science work as making progress on questions and problems their classroom community has committed to addres…
Reimagining american education
The COVID-19 pandemic led states and districts to take a break from grading students and pause standardized testing. As part of an ongoing series of articles on how schools might reconceptualize their work, William Penuel considers what kinds of assessment practices should be carried forward, as schools attempt to become more equitable. He suggests that schools look to work students create as evidence of learning, that they ensure their assessmen…
Fostering educational improvement with research-practice partnerships
Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) provide opportunities for researchers to support school districts in addressing the complex challenges they face. Cynthia E. Coburn, William R. Penuel, and Caitlin C. Farrell situate RPPs in the history of educational research and discuss the needs they were designed to address. They then describe what contemporary RPPs are and what they do and close by discussing ways that RPPs can contribute to educational …
Relevance of Educational Research
Educational research is repeatedly confronted with the question of its relevance. Current interpretations of relevance narrowly focus on outcomes and impact of research. In this essay, we propose an alternative, ontological conceptualization of relevance, arguing that more is at stake than outcomes and impact. We characterize the ontology of education and learning in terms of people’s meaningful movements in an always changing world and propose t…
Supporting Use of Data and Evidence from Early Warning Indicator Systems in Research–Practice Partnerships
Background/Context Research on data and evidence use suggest that productive use depends on interactive processes, including sustained interactions between educators and researchers. Recent research on research-practice partnerships (RPPs) has examined conditions under which these sustained collaborations support evidence use. Findings from these studies can inform research on early warning indicators, helping interpret implementation studies of …
Research–Practice Partnerships in Education
Policymakers, funders, and researchers today view research–practice partnerships (RPPs) as a promising approach for expanding the role of research in improving educational practice. Although studies in other fields provide evidence of the potential for RPPs, studies in education are few. This article provides a review of available evidence of the outcomes and dynamics of RPPs in education and related fields. It then outlines a research agenda for…
Organizing Research and Development at the Intersection of Learning, Implementation, and Design
This article describes elements of an approach to research and development called design-based implementation research. The approach represents an expansion of design research, which typically focuses on classrooms, to include development and testing of innovations that foster alignment and coordination of supports for improving teaching and learning. As in policy research, implementation is a key focus of theoretical development and analysis. Wh…
What Makes Professional Development Effective? Strategies That Foster Curriculum Implementation
This study uses a sample of 454 teachers engaged in an inquiry science program to examine the effects of different characteristics of professional development on teachers’ knowledge and their ability to implement the program. The authors analyzed results from a survey of teachers served by 28 professional development providers within a hierarchical linear modeling framework. Consistent with findings from earlier studies of effective professional …
Relevance to Practice as a Criterion for Rigor
The authors argue for a reconceptualization of rigor that requires sustained, direct, and systematic documentation of what takes place inside programs to document how students and teachers change and adapt interventions in interactions with each other in relation to their dynamic local contexts. Building on promising new programs at the Institute of Education Sciences, they call for the formulation of collaborative research standards that must re…
Studying Teachers’ Sensemaking to Investigate Teachers’ Responses to Professional Development Focused on New Standards
Recent research on teacher professional development (PD) underscores the importance of the coherence of PD with standards, curriculum, and assessment. Teachers’ judgments of the coherence of PD with larger system goals influence their decisions about what ideas and resources they appropriate from PD. Little research, however, has examined how teachers formulate these judgments and why teachers’ judgments vary within the same system and for the sa…
Focus, Fiddle, and Friends
Although knowledge has been linked to productivity within and between organizations, little is known about how knowledge flows into schools and then diffuses from teacher to teacher within schools. Here, the authors hypothesize that the value of different sources of knowledge depends on a teacher's current level of implementation. The authors test their theory using longitudinal network data from 470 teachers in 13 schools. From models of change …
Learning at the Boundaries of Research and Practice
Given the rapid growth of research–practice partnerships (RPPs), we need a framework that helps the field understand how RPPs can facilitate organizational learning in service of local educational improvement and transformation. Drawing on sociocultural and organizational learning theories, we argue that learning can happen for the organizations engaged in RPPs at the boundaries of research and practice. Such learning is evident when there are ch…
Preparing Teachers to Design Sequences of Instruction in Earth Systems Science
This research study examined whether and how professional development can help teachers design sequences of instruction that lead to improved science learning. The efficacy of three professional development programs and a control condition was compared in a cluster randomized trial involving 53 middle school science teachers from a single school district. The four conditions varied along two dimensions: (a) the extent to which the programs guided…
What Is a “Good” Social Network for Policy Implementation? The Flow of Know-How for Organizational Change
This study concerns how intraorganizational networks affect the implementation of policies and practices in organizations. In particular, we attend to the role of the informal subgroup or clique in cultivating and distributing locally adapted and integrated knowledge, or know‐how. We develop two hypotheses based on the importance of intraorganizational coordination for an organization's capacity for change. The first emphasizes the importance of …
Using Social Network Analysis to Study How Collegial Interactions Can Augment Teacher Learning from External Professional Development
This article presents an analysis showing how collegial interactions can augment the mechanism of teachers’ learning from professional development. The analysis relies on social network data and self-reports of writing instructional practices from teachers in 20 different schools that were part of a longitudinal study of the National Writing Project’s partnership activities. The results indicate that both organized professional development and in…
Relevance of Educational Research
Educational research is repeatedly confronted with the question of its relevance. Current interpretations of relevance narrowly focus on outcomes and impact of research. In this essay, we propose an alternative, ontological conceptualization of relevance, arguing that more is at stake than outcomes and impact. We characterize the ontology of education and learning in terms of people’s meaningful movements in an always changing world and propose t…
Implementation of Evidence‐based Practice in Human Service Organizations
Much of the impact of a policy depends on how it is implemented, especially as mediated by organizations such as schools or hospitals. Here, we focus on how implementation of evidence-based practices in human service organizations (e.g., schools, hospitals)is affected by intraorganizational network dynamics. In particular, we hypothesize intraorganizational behavioral divergence and network polarization are likely to occur when actors strongly id…
Investigating the Potential of Using Social Network Analysis in Educational Evaluation
This article describes results of a study investigating the potential of using social network analysis to evaluate programs that aim at improving schools by fostering greater collaboration between teachers. The goal of this method is to use data about teacher collaboration within schools to map the distribution of expertise and resources needed to enact reforms. Such maps are of great potential value to school leaders, who are responsible for ins…
Dignity-Affirming Care in Research-Practice Partnerships
Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) have the potential to affirm the dignity of participants through caring interactions, which support good relationships. A key ethical principle to guide the cultivation of good relationships in an RPP is a quality of relating that we call dignity-affirming care. We define dignity-affirming care as speech, actions, and dispositions that demonstrate concern for another and their expressed needs and goals in a m…
Assessment to Promote Equity and Epistemic Justice
Efforts to align educational assessments with the sociocultural foundations of learning and with instruction are limited because we lack evidence of how such systems can be developed and maintained in inherently complex educational settings. Credible use cases are helpful to developing the evidence base, and we present one here: a research-practice partnership between a university and a large urban school district. The goals of our codesigned sys…
Going on a statewide listening tour
This study explores how involving education leaders in the process of research can enhance the practical value of research for them. This paper describes: 1) a design process used for engaging US state science leaders in participatory research; and 2) shifts in understanding that state leaders reported based on their participation. The authors explicate the steps of how they engaged practitioners in the process of data collection and analysis. Th…
From Designing to Organizing New Social Futures
More than 20 years ago, literacy pedagogies informed by the emerging networked world defined by local diversity and global connectedness, new digital media and fast capitalism. Modern people now fully inhabit the world they described, but the contours of that world’s racial dynamics and growing inequality call for a refinement of pedagogies that embrace a more activist metaphor than that of design. Our pedagogies of multiliteracies must now embra…
Brokering research in science education policy implementation
Recent scholarship suggests that research use is an interactive, social phenomenon, and that brokers play important roles in facilitating the exchange of research evidence. We add to this body of literature by exploring the role of brokers in the exchange of research evidence among state education agency leaders involved in K–12 science education policy implementation in the United States. We focus our study on the lead professional association f…
Building an Assessment Argument to Design and Use Next Generation Science Assessments in Efficacy Studies of Curriculum Interventions
Evaluators must employ research designs that generate compelling evidence related to the worth or value of programs, of which assessment data often play a critical role. This article focuses on assessment design in the context of evaluation. It describes the process of using the Framework for K-12 Science Education and Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) to design assessments to evaluate the efficacy of a curricular intervention. The new sci…
Using Large-Scale Databases in Evaluation
Major advances in the number, capabilities, and quality of state, national, and transnational databases have opened up new opportunities for evaluators. Both large-scale data sets collected for administrative purposes and those collected by other researchers can provide data for a variety of evaluation-related activities. These include (a) identifying or highlighting issues that invite greater client attention; (b) establishing the plausibility o…
I don't like to live nowhere but here
Identity formation, from a sociocultural perspective, involves people choosing from among the variety of historical and cultural resources available to them for living their values, making a commitment to a particular life course, and grounding their hope in the future. Researchers in the past have argued that homeless shelters provide few such resources for children and youth to form healthy identities. At the same time, these researchers have n…
Vygotsky and identity formation
This article considers how Vygotsky's approach to investigating human mental functioning can inform identity research. An integrative sociocultural approach to identity formation is presented here, an approach that utilizes different elements of both Vygotsky's and Erikson's work. Specifically, identity researchers are directed to study identity in local activity settings where participants are actively engaged in forming their identities; to exa…
Dynamics of Negation in the Identity Politics of Cultural Other and Cultural Self
This paper examines the findings of Shi-xu (1995) in terms of how texts that represent a cultural Other may be interpreted as a way of constructing a cultural self. Even when attempting to move beyond colonial and demeaning representations of the cultural Other, these western writers in fact construct a vision of the Other that signifies their own desires and values. Westerners construct their identity dialogically in the texts analyzed by Shi-xu…
Between Self and Tribe
The Dialogical Self
I don't like to live nowhere but here
Identity formation, from a sociocultural perspective, involves people choosing from among the variety of historical and cultural resources available to them for living their values, making a commitment to a particular life course, and grounding their hope in the future. Researchers in the past have argued that homeless shelters provide few such resources for children and youth to form healthy identities. At the same time, these researchers have n…
Investigating the Potential of Using Social Network Analysis in Educational Evaluation
This article describes results of a study investigating the potential of using social network analysis to evaluate programs that aim at improving schools by fostering greater collaboration between teachers. The goal of this method is to use data about teacher collaboration within schools to map the distribution of expertise and resources needed to enact reforms. Such maps are of great potential value to school leaders, who are responsible for ins…
What Makes Professional Development Effective? Strategies That Foster Curriculum Implementation
This study uses a sample of 454 teachers engaged in an inquiry science program to examine the effects of different characteristics of professional development on teachers’ knowledge and their ability to implement the program. The authors analyzed results from a survey of teachers served by 28 professional development providers within a hierarchical linear modeling framework. Consistent with findings from earlier studies of effective professional …
Analyzing Teachers’ Professional Interactions in a School as Social Capital
Background/Context Researchers have proposed a number of lenses for analyzing teacher professional communities in recent years. These lenses have been useful in describing key dynamics of professional communities; however, none provides a compelling approach to how to integrate data from the school as a whole with case study data on individual interactions to create a coherent account of the structure and dynamics of teacher professional communit…
Using Large-Scale Databases in Evaluation
Major advances in the number, capabilities, and quality of state, national, and transnational databases have opened up new opportunities for evaluators. Both large-scale data sets collected for administrative purposes and those collected by other researchers can provide data for a variety of evaluation-related activities. These include (a) identifying or highlighting issues that invite greater client attention; (b) establishing the plausibility o…
Supplementing literacy instruction with a media-rich intervention
Organizing Research and Development at the Intersection of Learning, Implementation, and Design
This article describes elements of an approach to research and development called design-based implementation research. The approach represents an expansion of design research, which typically focuses on classrooms, to include development and testing of innovations that foster alignment and coordination of supports for improving teaching and learning. As in policy research, implementation is a key focus of theoretical development and analysis. Wh…
Preparing Teachers to Design Sequences of Instruction in Earth Systems Science
This research study examined whether and how professional development can help teachers design sequences of instruction that lead to improved science learning. The efficacy of three professional development programs and a control condition was compared in a cluster randomized trial involving 53 middle school science teachers from a single school district. The four conditions varied along two dimensions: (a) the extent to which the programs guided…
Focus, Fiddle, and Friends
Although knowledge has been linked to productivity within and between organizations, little is known about how knowledge flows into schools and then diffuses from teacher to teacher within schools. Here, the authors hypothesize that the value of different sources of knowledge depends on a teacher's current level of implementation. The authors test their theory using longitudinal network data from 470 teachers in 13 schools. From models of change …
(Re)Framing Educational Possibility
Accounts of how culture constitutes the learning activities we accomplish with others are flourishing. These accounts illustrate how participants draw upon, adapt, and contest historically situated social practices, tools, and relations to accomplish their learning goals [Vygotsky: Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1978]. Yet, they often lack attention to the ways that these social features reify and are reified by broader power structures and…
Contents Vol. 55, 2012
Using Social Network Analysis to Study How Collegial Interactions Can Augment Teacher Learning from External Professional Development
This article presents an analysis showing how collegial interactions can augment the mechanism of teachers’ learning from professional development. The analysis relies on social network data and self-reports of writing instructional practices from teachers in 20 different schools that were part of a longitudinal study of the National Writing Project’s partnership activities. The results indicate that both organized professional development and in…
Emerging Forms of Formative Intervention Research in Education
This article focuses on emerging forms of formative intervention research in educational settings in the United States. The examples presented share three key features with cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) formative intervention research: (a) a focus on historically accumulating structural tensions within and across activity systems, (b) use of double-stimulation as a method of intervention, and (c) expanding agency as the object of int…
Relevance to Practice as a Criterion for Rigor
The authors argue for a reconceptualization of rigor that requires sustained, direct, and systematic documentation of what takes place inside programs to document how students and teachers change and adapt interventions in interactions with each other in relation to their dynamic local contexts. Building on promising new programs at the Institute of Education Sciences, they call for the formulation of collaborative research standards that must re…
Conceptualizing Research–Practice Partnerships as Joint Work at Boundaries
This article presents a conceptual framework for analyzing how researchers and district leaders perceive and navigate differences they encounter in the context of research–practice partnerships. Our framework contrasts with images of partnership work as facilitating the translation of research into practice. Instead, we argue that partnership activity is best viewed as a form of joint work requiring mutual engagement across multiple boundaries. D…
Building an Assessment Argument to Design and Use Next Generation Science Assessments in Efficacy Studies of Curriculum Interventions
Evaluators must employ research designs that generate compelling evidence related to the worth or value of programs, of which assessment data often play a critical role. This article focuses on assessment design in the context of evaluation. It describes the process of using the Framework for K-12 Science Education and Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) to design assessments to evaluate the efficacy of a curricular intervention. The new sci…
What Is a “Good” Social Network for Policy Implementation? The Flow of Know-How for Organizational Change
This study concerns how intraorganizational networks affect the implementation of policies and practices in organizations. In particular, we attend to the role of the informal subgroup or clique in cultivating and distributing locally adapted and integrated knowledge, or know‐how. We develop two hypotheses based on the importance of intraorganizational coordination for an organization's capacity for change. The first emphasizes the importance of …
Studying Teachers’ Sensemaking to Investigate Teachers’ Responses to Professional Development Focused on New Standards
Recent research on teacher professional development (PD) underscores the importance of the coherence of PD with standards, curriculum, and assessment. Teachers’ judgments of the coherence of PD with larger system goals influence their decisions about what ideas and resources they appropriate from PD. Little research, however, has examined how teachers formulate these judgments and why teachers’ judgments vary within the same system and for the sa…
Research–Practice Partnerships in Education
Policymakers, funders, and researchers today view research–practice partnerships (RPPs) as a promising approach for expanding the role of research in improving educational practice. Although studies in other fields provide evidence of the potential for RPPs, studies in education are few. This article provides a review of available evidence of the outcomes and dynamics of RPPs in education and related fields. It then outlines a research agenda for…
Blurring the Boundaries Between School and Community
In participatory cultures, the lines between producers and consumers of text are blurred, and communities emerge that are based on shared interest and peer support. Although literacy scholarship has mostly focused on youth engagement and literacy practices within online participatory cultures, scholars in the learning sciences investigate these ideas through connected learning. This article explores bringing connected learning principles into Eng…
The material and social constitution of interest
Psychology (37 works) · Sociology (37 works) · Pedagogy (29 works) · Political science (29 works) · Computer Science (28 works) · Mathematics education (21 works) · Public relations (17 works) · Social science (16 works) · Educational Assessment and Improvement (15 works) · Teacher Education and Leadership Studies (14 works)