Who | Learning Lab

Advisory Council

Cindy Johanson

Executive Director, Edutopia

Cindy leads one of the premier internet resources for educators looking for insights and inspiration about what works in schools and classrooms. She brings to that role her experience leading and designing online learning efforts for the Public Broadcasting Service, including pbskids.org, pbsparents.org, and pbsteacher-source.org. Cindy’s areas of interest and expertise include school-based innovations, online learning, individualized learning, project-based learning, and social-emotional learning.

Parisa Rouhani

Co-Founder & COO, Center for Individual Opportunity

Parisa is a Research Fellow with the Laboratory for the Science of the Individual at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where her work focuses on issues at the intersection of individuality, design and technology. With Todd Rose, she founded and runs the Center for Individual Opportunity, focusing on shifting societal understanding of the need for personalized learning. She received her Master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Technology, Innovation, and Education in 2009.

Sarah Wolman

Head of Partnerships, North America. LEGO Foundation

Sarah Wolman is Head of Partnerships, North America at the LEGO Foundation. Sarah’s work includes the Early Learning Fund with New Profit, the Play Every Day Initiative with Sesame Workshop, the Frontiers of Innovation collaboration with the Harvard Center for the Developing Child, and the LEGO Idea Conference. Early in her career, while in law school, Sarah used family and criminal law lessons to motivate middle school students in Harlem classrooms. She then went on to write curricula, train teachers, and lead after-school and college readiness programs for youth from underserved NYC neighborhoods. Sarah later served as Executive Director of community-based organization that provided early childhood education and care, mentoring and other services to low-income children and families. In prior roles, she has also worked for the Office the Mayor of the City of New York, the New York City Administration for Children’s Services and the Merck Company Foundation. Having recently returned from two years in Switzerland, Sarah and her family live in a happily chaotic household in Montclair, New Jersey.

Sharath Jeevan

Founder & CEO of STIR Education (www.stireducation.org).

STIR motivates, networks and empowers teachers to become committed, skilfull and influential changemakers and practitioners - so they can improve their own teaching, as well as contribute to a wider teacher led-movement for change. Working in India, Kenya, and the UK so far, STIR seeks to reach a movement of 120,000 teachers by 2020, improving learning levels for over 4.5 million children.

Sharath previously served as Founding CEO of Teaching Leaders, an initiative to raise attainment in the UK’s most disadvantaged schools, which expanded across the UK and was replicated in the US by the Gates Foundation. Sharath was formerly Head of Social Ventures at eBay UK; a Project Leader at international strategy consultants Booz & Co; and a Senior Manager at NGO Action Aid. His education includes a First Class Economics Degree from Cambridge University, MSt from Oxford University, and an MBA with Distinction from INSEAD.

Susana Claro

Co-Founder EnseñaChile, PhD Stanford

Susana is the co-founder of Enseña Chile, which has been part of the Teach for All network since 2008. She has just completed her PhD at Stanford, where she focused her research interests on improving education for low income students. She recently published, in collaboration with Dr. Carol Dweck, a widely circulated study called “Growth Mindset Tempers the Effects of Poverty on Academic Achievement.”

Before pursing her PhD, Susana was advisor to the Secretary of Education in Chile to help schools recover after her nation experienced a massive earthquake, and she worked on developing collaborative software for classrooms in different schools around the world. She is member of Advisory Board of Comunidad Mujer. She graduated as a civil engineer and computer scientist in Chile before receiving a Masters in Education from Harvard University.

Tony Bryk

President, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

Anthony S. Bryk is leading work on transforming educational research and development, more closely joining researchers and practitioners to improve teaching and learning. Formerly, he was a professor and research in the School of Education and the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He came to Stanford from the University of Chicago where he was a professor of Urban Education helped found the Center for Urban School Improvement.

Tony is one of America’s most noted educational researchers. He is a member of the National Academy of Education and was appointed by President Obama to the National Board for Education Sciences in 2010. In 2011, he was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In his most recent work, Learning to Improve<http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/resources/publications/learning-to-imp... (2015), Bryk argues improvement science combined with the power of networks offers the field a new approach to reach ever increasing educational aspirations. Bryk holds a B.S. from Boston College and an Ed.D. from Harvard University.

Our Core Team

Archana Iyer

Director, Transformational Outcomes - Teach for All

Archana has worn many hats during her career – a marketer, business leader, teacher, teacher educator, and a product manager. This has given her a unique perspective on managing multi-disciplinary initiatives and complex challenges. She is the former Senior Manager of Flipkart, India’s best website for online retail. Previous to this work, she was a Project Leader at Firki, a world-class open source online training portal, in which she led the design of the first bilingual teacher training portal for public school teachers in India. From 2011 to 2013, Archana taught a fifth grade class in Mumbai through Teach for India, where she was recognized with the Transformational Impact Journey Award for the most outstanding teacher across the organization. As of April 2016, Archana leads a cross-network initiative to "Redefine Student Success" and will be responsible for helping network partners identify both academic and non-academic outcomes required for students to live into partners' visions for their futures and also measure progress toward them.

Dan Konecky

Senior Specialist for Online Learning - Teach For All

Dan Konecky is a Senior Specialist for Online Learning at Teach For All. Mr Konecky works with content experts to re-imagine their coursework in an online environment, directs the production of those re-imagined elements, and identifies and disseminates best practices and emerging tools to help others design and facilitate online instruction. Prior to this role, Mr Konecky was the founding Director of Online Development at Relay Graduate School of Education, and a former public-radio news producer and freelance reporter. He began his professional career teaching American history as a Teach For America corps member in New Orleans. A California native, he now lives in Brooklyn with his wife, two children and (moderately) annoying cat.

Rachel Brody

Director of Learner Variability - Teach For All

Rachel is the Director of Learner Variability on the Transformational Learning and Leadership team at Teach For All. Prior to joining staff at Teach For All, Rachel launched and led the Diverse Learner Initiative at Teach For America that focused on ensuring that ALL (special and general educators) TFA teachers had the mindset, skills and knowledge to “teach to the edges” to reach all learners. Rachel’s career in education began in Washington, DC where she taught for 6 years and earned her M.Ed in Special Education. With specific experience in Universal Design for Learning, Culturally Responsive Practices and working with English Language Learners, Rachel facilitated the Diverse Learner graduate course for The Center for Inspired Teaching, and has worked with schools and education organizations from multiple contexts to support their work in these domains. She currently lives in Seattle, Washington – USA and enjoys practicing yoga and meditation, exploring with 1.5 year old nephew, Keaton, rock climbing and reading as much as possible in her free time!

Raimundo Larrain

Director, Transformational Learning and Leadership Lab - Teach for All

Raimundo is the Director, Transformational Learning and Leadership Lab at Teach For All. He is also the Co-Founder of Impulso Docente, a non-profit organization that aims to accelerate the impact of teachers entering the educational system, by developing the essential skills they need in order to succeed from day one.

Prior to his role in Teach For All, Raimundo worked as the Summer Institute Director and Program Coordinator at Enseña Ecuador.

Raimundo is an Enseña Chile alumnus and holds a M.A. International Educational Development by The Teachers College (Columbia University).

Sarah King

Director, Classroom Leadership - Teach for All

Sarah grew up in Chicago and attended Carleton College as a Posse Leadership & Diversity Scholar. After graduating, she returned to Chicago to work with incredible students and their families at an innovative college access start-up called the Schuler Scholar Program. These college access experiences (her own and those with her students) drive her conviction about realizing students’ leadership inside and outside of the classroom. Sarah went on to work at Teach For America for five years, supporting the launch of the Philanthropic Leadership Circle, a group of TFA’s most committed supporters learning about and grappling with key education issues such as racial justice, parent engagement, and more. Then, she worked on the program insights teams at TFA and Teach For All. In 2015, she moved full time to Teach For All to continue capturing, codifying, and disseminating insights from transformational classrooms across the network. Sarah enjoys social justice issues, art, yoga, reading, and cooking.

Steven Farr

Senior Director, Classroom Leadership - Teach For All

Steven Farr began leading training and support efforts at Teach For America fifteen years ago and is today working with Teach For All as well, looking across geographical and cultural differences to study and share innovations in transformational learning and leadership. He is the author of Teaching As Leadership: The Highly Effective Teacher’s Guide to Closing the Achievement Gap and his work has been featured in the Atlantic Monthly, on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” and on ABC World News Tonight as part of the Person of the Week segment. His “teaching as leadership” framework [www.teachingasleadership.org] is a foundational leadership development model for many Teach For All partners.

A graduate of the University of Texas’s Plan II Honors program and Yale Law School, Steven taught high school English and English as a second language as a part of the 1993 Teach For America corps in the Rio Grande Valley. After law school, Steven clerked for the Honorable William Wayne Justice in federal district court in Texas before teaching civil rights and disability rights at the Georgetown University Law Center. Steven is the father of three children and the husband of the head of the juvenile public defender unit in Washington, DC.

Tim Davis

Director, Transformational Learning

After working as a research scientist in drug discovery for Pfizer, Tim joined the 2005 cohort of Teach First in the United Kingdom as a science teacher, where he taught for four years. He then led Teach First’s support of alumni teachers. For the last several years at Teach For All, Tim has worked with partner organizations on fundamental questions of transformational learning and leadership, from teacher mindsets and actions to student outcomes to evolving local visions of student success. Soon to be an officially certified professional coach himself, Tim will lead the Transformational Learning & Leadership Fellowship, dedicating half of his time to it.