Tanner LeBaron Wallace

Dr. Wallace is a fourth generation teacher. What she gained from growing up around teachers (beyond a remarkable tolerance for cooperative learning structures being integrated in everything from planning a trip to grocery shopping) is an inherent sense of the transformative possibility of skill set acquisition. She aims through her research agenda to shift the current discourse around effective teachers to focus more explicitly on adolescent learning as the basis for effective teaching. Dr. Wallace's research program shows how important the student's insider perspective is in assessing classroom quality--and how this perspective fails to be captured in the predominant classroom measurement instruments, almost all of which rely on the outsider's perspective of adult coders. She studies adolescents’ interpretations of instructional interactions and how these affect learning outcomes. She has identified underlying variability in teacher practice that is not captured in observational measures of effective teaching—developed and constructed exclusively on adult-centric perspectives of instructional practice.