Professional Biography

Dr. Sarah Kavanagh is a leading expert in teacher education, instructional coaching, and professional development. A former middle and high school teacher, her work aims to make public the intricacies, complexities, and nuances of teachers’ practice and designs for teacher learning. She is at the forefront of efforts to reimagine infrastructures for teacher professional learning across the career span.

Dr. Kavanagh is an associate professor of teacher education in the Learning, Teaching, and Literacies Division. She is also the Director of the Collaboratory for Teaching and Teacher Education and a Co-Principal Investigator of several large research grants investigating designs for K–12 teacher learning. Prior to joining Penn GSE, Dr. Kavanagh was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University’s Center to Support Excellence in Teaching and a research scientist at the University of Washington’s College of Education where she also received her Ph.D. She began her career as a middle and high school teacher, first in California’s Bay Area and then in the Baltimore area.

Her research has been funded by the Spencer Foundation, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, and Lucas Education Research, among other organizations, and she has served on the editorial boards of leading educational research journals including the American Educational Research Journal and Reading Research Quarterly. Among other notable academic journals, her research has appeared in the American Educational Research Journal, Educational Researcher, Cognition & Instruction, Teachers College Record, the Journal of Teacher Education, and Teaching and Teacher Education. She also co-authored the book Core Practices for Project-Based Learning: A Guide for Teachers and Leaders (Harvard Education Press, 2021).

Research Interests and Current Projects

Dr. Kavanagh’s current research centers on supporting teachers to translate their justice and equity beliefs and commitments into K–12 educational practices. Her current projects undertake this work in three ways: First, through research into justice-oriented teaching, she investigates the practices of teachers who meaningfully address issues of race, gender, and sexuality with K–12 students. Second, through research into inquiry-based and discourse-rich teaching, she studies how teachers position students as producers rather than consumers of knowledge. Third, through research into the practices of teacher educators, she explores the ways that teacher educators support K–12 teachers to attempt justice-oriented, inquiry-based, and discourse-rich teaching. These current projects are funded by several large, multi-year grants and involve in-depth partnerships with K–12 schools.

Selected Publications