Professional Biography
Dr. Katie Pak is a graduate of the Educational Leadership Ed.D. program at the University of Pennsylvania. As a doctoral student, she co-taught qualitative research methods courses, designed and facilitated professional development for educational leaders both in the United States and in India, coached and mentored elementary, middle, and high school teachers in the School District of Philadelphia, and participated in research-practice partnerships with the central office. She was recognized with Penn GSE’s William E. Arnold Award for Outstanding Contributions by a Student in 2019.
As a postdoctoral fellow, she is coordinating research, publication, and national leadership opportunities for the last year of the IES-funded Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Leadership (C-SAIL). She also serves as a Penn Liaison with Penn GSE’s Mental Health and Optimal Development Consortium, where she helps facilitate the implementation of Penn GSE’s professional learning on topics related to socioemotional learning and mental wellness (e.g., restorative practice, trauma-informed practice) at a district and school level. Finally, she is also obtaining her principal certification through Penn GSE’s School Leadership Program during this postdoctoral year.
Dr. Pak started her career as a special education teacher in Washington, D.C. and as a part-time program coordinator in the D.C. Public Schools central office.
Research Interests and Current Projects
Dr. Pak currently serves as a researcher with C-SAIL, where for the past five years, she has helped to manage the team’s qualitative research on state-level, district-level, and school-level implementation of standards policies (e.g., standards adoption, revision, curriculum design, curricular enactment, professional development, assessments, accountability, college and career readiness, inclusion and differentiation for students with disabilities, inclusion and differentiation for English learners). Throughout the course of this five-year study, she has applied leadership theories (e.g., distributed leadership, adaptive leadership), teacher learning theories, disability studies, and curricular theories to understand policy implementation trends, affordances, and challenges. With this team, she is currently synthesizing findings in a book tentatively titled, “Ever Up to Standard: The Perpetual Project of K-12 Standards in the United States.”
Her dissertation work involved case studies of five high schools undergoing district-initiated turnaround reforms, where she highlighted how school staffs’ trust and motivation to enact this central office mandate were mediated by the sociopolitical context, teaching/learning norms at the high school level (including norms of racial literacy), and the technical infrastructure of the reform initiative. She used these findings to design a district leadership framework that attends to these dimensions of change. She was awarded dissertation with distinction as a result of this work.
Her third strand of research explores the reciprocal relationships between critical theory and the practice of educational leadership. This research stemmed from an ongoing interest in equity, justice, racial identity development, and leadership identity development. With two other Penn GSE doctoral students, Elaine Leigh and Jenn Phuong, she produced a collaborative autoethnographic study that problematizes hegemonic conceptualizations of “leadership” and “activism” through lenses of critical race and intersectional theories, based on our positionalities as doctoral students leading activism work. With Professor Sharon Ravitch and other doctoral students, alumni, and practitioners associated with Penn GSE, she is also developing a book project that showcases theories of action for leading critical social change.
