Professional Biography
L. Michael Golden is a proven education leader committed to education reform. He brings expertise in envisioning and implementing the convergence of business, technology, and education in established, emergent, and public sector environments. Dr. Golden launched and leads Catalyst @ Penn GSE. Catalyst is an endeavor to design innovative practices and to create and scale actionable solutions to advance opportunity for all learners. Building on Penn GSE's history of pioneering innovation and entrepreneurship in education, Catalyst combines ideas from education, technology, and business to address the pressing problems in education. Leveraging expertise from both inside and outside the academy, Catalyst spreads effective practices, crowd-sources ideas, operationalizes research, generates thought leadership, and brings together communities to shape the future of education across preK-12, higher education, and executive learning. Dr. Golden also serves as a member of the faculty at Penn GSE, where he teaches within several of the School’s master’s and doctoral programs.
Prior to joining GSE, Dr. Golden co-founded and served as CEO of Educurious, a non-profit corporation that provides project-based courses and professional development aimed at motivating students to become purposeful, self-confident, and successful in their learning.
Dr. Golden began his career in education as Deputy Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Education, where he set strategy, policy, programs, and legislation for over two million students. As Deputy Secretary, he developed systems and directed funding to make schools more effective and efficient, including formulating and implementing statewide education technology policies and initiatives. He envisioned and rolled out a groundbreaking $250 million reform to embed student-centered, inquiry-based, data-driven pedagogy in Pennsylvania's 622 high schools through connected classrooms and one-to-one computing environments. He is a proud product of the Pennsylvania public school system.
Dr. Golden next served as Senior Vice President at Pearson, where he led the planning and administrative functions for Pearson’s U.S. education division, including strategy, marketing, business development, and research. He then became Corporate Vice President of Education at Microsoft. In this role, he directed the development and execution of Microsoft’s global efforts in education across the company.
Dr. Golden holds an Ed.D. in Education Leadership from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, and a B.A. from Williams College.
Dr. Golden’s research interests focus on how we can establish educational systems and communities that support all educators and learners. He focuses on how innovative and entrepreneurial practices, approaches, and solutions can disrupt the institutionalized inequities from both the outside and within to prepare all students for the future of work and life.
He leads the development of solutions and services to support educators to transform education through professional learning and capacity-building programs and collaborative networks of practitioners to advance education in meaningful ways and provide access for all. He is leading the strategy and development of online degree programs and training of faculty to design and implement teaching and learning in remote, online, hybrid, and blended environments. He is establishing new processes and approaches to create the future of teaching and learning through design thinking, virtual reality, innovation mindset, digital teaching and learning, and other new ways to leverage learning sciences and technology to improve learner success. He and his team co-produced EdTech Week, Symposium on How Innovations Flourish, The Future of Work Convening, The Future of Higher Education Bootcamp, and other conferences on redesigning our education systems to prepare learners across the world for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Dr. Golden and his team also manage a multi-year grant from the McGraw Family Foundation to support the prestigious Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education Innovation. In addition, they developed a continuum of education programming to spark innovation through education entrepreneurship, elevated the Milken-Penn GSE Education Business Plan Competition to the pre-eminent education business plan competition, and launched Catapult, a virtual accelerator that takes education entrepreneurship to the next level.
