Richard Halverson

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Kellner Family Distinguished Professor of Urban Education

Richard Halverson is Professor and Kellner Family Distinguished Chair in Urban Education in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin Madison. His research brings theories, methods, and design traditions from the Learning Sciences to the study of educational leadership and learning technologies. Halverson's scholarship advances a practice centered theory of school leadership grounded in practical wisdom. He co-developed distributed leadership as an analytic framework to study how leadership practice is organized in schools, and his work on personalized learning examines how school leaders can reshaping schooling to support student agency. Halverson leads the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning-Equity Centered Leadership project to document and support equity focused leadership practice in schools and districts. He is a director of Leadership for Learning LLC, which develops tools to support instructional leadership improvement in schools around the world. He was a founder of the Games+Learning+Society Research Center and led the Data Driven Instructional Systems research project. He also founded the Wisconsin Collaborative Education Research Network, a statewide initiative that connected education organizations with university research communities. A former high school teacher and administrator, Halverson earned an MA in Philosophy and a PhD in the Learning Sciences from Northwestern University. He is co-author, with Allan Collins, of Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America and, with Carolyn Kelley, of Mapping Leadership: The Tasks that Matter for Improving Teaching and Learning in Schools.