Yong Zhao

Yong Zhao is Foundations Distinguished Professor in the School of Education with an appointment in the School of Business at the University of Kansas. He is also a professor of educational leadership at Melbourne Graduate School of Education. Prior to joining University of Kansas, he served as the Presidential Chair, Director of the Institute for Global and Online Education, and Associate Dean in the College of Education, University of Oregon, where he was also a Professor in the Department of Educational Measurement, Policy, and Leadership. Until December 2010, Zhao was University Distinguished Professor at the College of Education, Michigan State University, where he also served as the founding director of the Center for Teaching and Technology and executive director of the US-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence.

Yong Zhao has published over 100 articles and 30 books, including Teaching Students to Become Self-Determined Learners (with M. Wehmeyer) (ASCD, 2020), An Education Crisis Is a Terrible Thing to Waste: How Radical Changes Can Spark Student Excitement and Success (with T. Emler, T. Snethen, & D, Yin) (Teachers College Press, 2019), What Works May Hurt: Side Effects in Education (Teachers College Press, 2018), Reach for Greatness: Personalizable Education for all Children (2018), Counting What Counts: Reframing Education Outcomes(2016), Never Send a Human to Do a Machine’s Job: Correcting Top 5 Ed Tech Mistakes (2015), Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World (2014), Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization (2009) and World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students (2012).

Yong Zhao has received numerous awards including the Early Career Award from the American Educational Research Association, Outstanding Public Educator from Horace Mann League of USA, and Distinguished Achievement Award in Professional Development from the Association of Education Publishers. He is an elected fellow of the International Academy for Education.

Zhao was born in China’s Sichuan Province. He received his B.A. in English Language Education from Sichuan Institute of Foreign Languages in 1986. After teaching English in China for six years, he came to Linfield College as a visiting scholar in 1992. He then began his graduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1993 and received his A.M. in Education in 1994 and Ph.D. in 1996. He joined the faculty at MSU in 1996 after working as the Language Center Coordinator at Willamette University and a language specialist at Hamilton College.