Dr. Ann Lieberman is an emeritus professor from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is now a Senior Scholar at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and a Visiting Professor at Stanford University. She received her BA and Ed.D at UCLA. She got her Masters Degree at California State University at Northridge, where she also received an honorary degree.
Dr. Liberman was also the President of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in 1992. She is widely known for her work in the areas of teacher leadership and development, collaborative research, networks and school-university partnerships, and increasingly, on the problems and prospects for understanding educational change. Her recent books include Teachers: Transforming Their World and Their Work and Teachers Caught in the Action: The Work of Professional Development with Lynne Miller. She has just completed a book with Diane Wood entitled: Inside the National Writing Project: Network Learning and Classroom Teaching, a new synthesis to be published by the Teachers College Press.
Her many books and articles have been used by schools and universities alike. She has helped to bring research to the field and helped to popularize the perspective that learning from the field is another way to build important conceptions and knowledge about teaching and learning.
In addition, she is one of a few academics who has worked with both the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) in their efforts to expand their work to address "professional" issues of teaching and learning. With the AFT, she was on the first Advisory Board of the Educational Research and dissemination (ER & D) initiative where teachers began to use research to strengthen their classroom teaching. She is currently on an Advisory Board of the NEA.
She is on numerous national and international advisory boards as she brings multi- perspectives - that of a teacher, researcher, reformer and writer. As a researcher she is currently working on deepening the field’s understanding of different structures that support school reform including, most recently networks partnerships and coalitions.
Her unique contribution has been that she has been able to go between school and university - embracing the dualities that plague our field - theory/practice; process/content; intellectual/social-emotional learning; policy/practice - helping to build a more comprehensive understanding of teachers and schools and what it will take to involve them in deepening their work. To do this she has fashioned a way to be both a scholar and an activist, a practitioner and a theoretician.
