Biographical Sketch
MARILYN COCHRAN-SMITH is the Cawthorne Professor of Teacher Education for Urban Schools at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, Boston College, in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. She is also a Professor II (adjunct professor) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. At Boston College, she directed the Ph.D. program in Curriculum and Instruction for more than 20 years, from 1996-2017. A teacher and an education scholar and practitioner for more than 50 years, Dr. Cochran-Smith is widely known for her scholarship regarding teacher education research, practice and policy and for her sustained commitment to teaching and teacher education for diversity and social justice.
Professor Cochran-Smith was the principal investigator for a Spencer Foundation funded research project about teacher preparation at “new graduate schools of education” and the leader of Project TEER, which explored the impact and implications of the education reform movement for teacher education practice and policy related to evaluation and accountability. Dr. Cochran-Smith and the members of Project TEER (Cochran-Smith, Carney, Keefe, Burton, Chang, Fernández, Miller, Sánchez, & Baker)published Reclaiming Accountability in Teacher Education (Teachers College Press) in 2018. The book won four awards, including AERA’s Division K Distinguished Research and AACTE’s Best Book Award as well as being named a Critics' Choice book for 2018 by the American Educational Studies Association. Dr. Cochran-Smith has written nine other books, six of which have won national awards, and more than 200 articles, chapters, and editorials related to teacher education, practitioner inquiry, and teacher quality. From 2000-2006, she was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Teacher Education. Dr. Cochran-Smith also co-edited (with Sharon Feiman Nemser, John McIntyre, and Kelly Demers) the Third Handbook of Research on Teacher Education: Enduring Questions in Changing Contexts, which was published in 2008. She also chaired and edited with Kenneth Zeichner Studying Teacher Education, which was an AERA project published in 2005, which synthesized research on teacher education in key areas related to practice and policy.
A frequently honored scholar, Dr. Cochran-Smith is a former AERA President, a former AERA Vice President for Division K, an inaugural AERA Fellow, and an elected member of the National Academy of Education. Dr. Cochran-Smith has received two honorary doctorates from the University of Glasgow in Glasgow, Scotland, and the University of Alicante in Alicante, Spain, in recognition of her international work in teacher education research, practice and policy. She was awarded the AERA Division K (Teaching and Teacher Education) Legacy Award in 2019. Over the span of her career, she has received many other awards, including AERA’s Research to Practice Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Literacy Research Association, the Carl Grant Research Award from the National Association of Multicultural Education, and all of the major awards from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), including the David G. Imig Award for Achievement in Teacher Education, the Margaret B. Lindsey Award for Research in Teacher Education, and the Edward C. Pomeroy Award for Outstanding Contributions to Teacher Education. In 2006, Dr. Cochran-Smith served as the inaugural C.J. Koh Endowed Professor at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. In 2000, she was one of the first Scholars in Residence at the Mofet Institute for Teacher Education in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Dr. Cochran-Smith is also a frequent keynote presenter nationally and internationally. She presented the Dean’s Distinguished Lecture at the School of Education and Human Development, Texas A&M University in March, 2023, and gave the keynote address for the NAFOL international conference on the education of teacher educators in Trondheim, Norway, in 2022. Other selected presentations include the keynote address at the MOFET Conference in Tel Aviv, Israel; the New England Educational Research Association keynote in April 2019; keynotes for the Teacher Education and Educational Research in the Mediterranean Conference at the University of Malta and the Teacher Education Policy in Europe Conference in Braga, Portugal, both in May 2018; keynotes for the Global Trends and Challenges Facing Teacher Education Conference at Akershus University College in Oslo, Norway and for the National Association of Multicultural Education in Salt Lake City, Utah in November, 2017; the keynote for the Association of Teacher Education in Europe in Dubrovnik, Croatia in October, 2017; and an invited presentation for the ORD Annual Conference on Education Research in Leiden, Netherlands, in 2015.
In 2016 , Dr. Cochran-Smith and her husband, Dr. Larry Ludlow (Chair, Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics, and Analysis Department, at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, Boston College, lived in Auckland, New Zealand, where they were Adjunct Professors at the University of Auckland. During this time, they worked with the Project RITE research team and other University of Auckland faculty and students and spent time exploring the north island. They also lectured at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.
Dr. Cochran-Smith also presents regularly at colleges and universities in the U.S. and at the annual meetings of many national professional organizations related to teacher education, teacher quality and teaching.
Dr. Cochran-Smith has been an active member of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) for 40 years. She served as AERA President in 2004-2005, Vice President of AERA for Division K (Teaching and Teacher Education) in 1998-2000, Chair of the AERA Publications Committee in 2000-2003, Chair of the Task Force on Standards for Humanities and Arts-Based Education Research, 2006-2008, and a member of the Committee on Promotions and Tenure, 2012-2014. Dr. Cochran-Smith was Co-Chair (with Ken Zeichner) of AERA's National Panel on Research and Teacher Education and Co-Editor of the panel’s final report, Studying Teacher Education, which was published in 2005. Cochran-Smith is an AERA Fellow and a frequent presenter, chair and discussant for sessions in Division K, the Teacher as Researcher SIG, and a number of other divisions and SIGs each year.
Dr. Cochran-Smith was elected to the National Academy of Education in 2009, and she has been an active member since that time. From 2011-2015, she served as the inaugural Chair of the Professional Development Committee, which oversees the Academy’s two major fellowships programs, the NAEd/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowships and the NAEd/Spencer Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowships. She was also the Chair of the Fellowship Retreat Planning Committee. She served as a member of the NAEd Board of Directors from 2015-2019, and the Research Advisory Committee, 2022-2025.
Dr. Cochran-Smith was elected to the Laureate chapter of the national education honorary society, Kappa Delta Pi, in 2003 and served as the Laureate representative to the KDP Executive Council from 2010-2012. She also served on NCATE’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Clinical Preparation and Partnerships for Improved Student Learning, whose report, Transforming Teacher Education through Clinical Practice: A National Strategy to Prepare Effective Teachers, was published in 2010. She was also a member of the National Research Council’s Committee on Teacher Education, which was charged by Congress to study the state of teacher preparation in the U.S.; the group’s report, Preparing Teachers: Building Sound Evidence for Policy, was published in 2010. She was also a member of the National Academy of Education’s Committee on Teacher Preparation, whose report, Preparing Teachers for a Changing World, was also published in 2005.
Dr. Cochran-Smith and Dr. Susan Lyle are the founding co-editors of the Teachers College Press book series on Practitioner Inquiry. This book series, which is the only one of its kind in the world, includes dozens of books by practitioners and/or about practitioner research, including Inquiry as Stance: Practitioner Research for the Next Generation, which was co-authored by Cochran-Smith and Susan Lytle in 2009. The series reflects Cochran-Smith’s long-term research agenda related to theorizing and implementing in practice the notion of inquiry as a life-long stance on educational practice, including teaching, school leadership, and teacher education. Cochran-Smith and Lytle’s previous book on practitioner inquiry, Inside/Outside: Teacher Research and Knowledge has been a Teachers College Press best-seller since it was first published in 1994. Over the last 30 years, Cochran-Smith and Lytle have co-authored and co-presented their ideas about practitioner research in a wide array of scholarly and professional journals and at local, national and international conferences. Both Inside/Outside and Inquiry as Stance are widely used in the U.S. and internationally as texts for graduate courses and professional development projects and programs related to teacher research, action research, practitioner inquiry, and school leadership.
Dr. Cochran-Smith was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the College of Wooster in 1973 where she earned a B.A. with a major in sociology as well as certification as an elementary teacher, K-8. She later earned certification as a Reading Specialist and Reading Supervisor for all grade levels. Dr. Cochran-Smith began her education career as an elementary school teacher; she taught third, fifth and sixth grade reading, language arts, and social studies for six years. In 1975, she received the “Outstanding Young Educator Award,” for her school district. Dr. Cochran-Smith received her Ph.D. in Language and Education from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982. She served as a full-time lecturer, a tenure-track and then tenured Assistant and Associate Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education until 1996 when she joined the Lynch School of Education faculty at Boston College as Professor of Education. In 2005, she was named the inaugural holder of the John E. Cawthorne Chair in Teacher Education for Urban Schools.
In addition to her work nationally and internationally, Dr. Cochran-Smith was actively involved in the local work of teacher education and curriculum and instruction at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development for many years. Dr. Cochran-Smith co-chaired the committee overseeing the Council of Accreditation of Educator Preparation’s (CAEP) accreditation of the Lynch School of Education, 2016-2018. This group collected and analyzed multiple data sources related to the outcomes of teacher education, including graduates’ and program impact. In addition, Boston College was one of 11 sites of the national teacher education reform initiative, Teachers for New Era, from 2004-2009. Dr. Cochran-Smith was Chair of the Evidence Team for the TNE project, which was charged with creating and administering assessments regarding the impact and outcomes of the teacher education program and also fostering respect for evidence as part of the culture of teacher education. Members of the team presented this work at many sites locally, regionally, nationally and internationally through 2011, supported in part by an additional grant from the Ford Foundation, which investigated teacher development and teacher retention.
In addition to her work with the teacher education programs at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College, Dr. Cochran-Smith was the Director of the Ph.D. Program in Curriculum and Instruction from 1996 to 2017. In this capacity, she worked closely with students and fellow faculty on issues related to recruitment, admissions, curriculum, assessment, and mentoring. Dr. Cochran-Smith frequently co-authors and co-presents with her students at regional and national conferences.
From 2012-2016, Dr. Cochran-Smith was the Co-Director (with Dr. Lexie Grudnoff) of Project RITE (Rethinking Initial Teacher Education for Equity), a two-country research team, which features teacher education practitioners and researchers from the Lynch School of Education at Boston College and the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Education in Auckland, New Zealand. Dr. Cochran-Smith continued as an active member of the group for many years, supporting annual presentations at AERA and at regional conferences in both the U.S. and New Zealand.
Professor Cochran-Smith was the principal investigator for a Spencer Foundation funded research project about teacher preparation at “new graduate schools of education” and the leader of Project TEER, which explored the impact and implications of the education reform movement for teacher education practice and policy related to evaluation and accountability. Dr. Cochran-Smith and the members of Project TEER (Cochran-Smith, Carney, Keefe, Burton, Chang, Fernández, Miller, Sánchez, & Baker)published Reclaiming Accountability in Teacher Education (Teachers College Press) in 2018. The book won four awards, including AERA’s Division K Distinguished Research and AACTE’s Best Book Award as well as being named a Critics' Choice book for 2018 by the American Educational Studies Association. Dr. Cochran-Smith has written nine other books, six of which have won national awards, and more than 200 articles, chapters, and editorials related to teacher education, practitioner inquiry, and teacher quality. From 2000-2006, she was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Teacher Education. Dr. Cochran-Smith also co-edited (with Sharon Feiman Nemser, John McIntyre, and Kelly Demers) the Third Handbook of Research on Teacher Education: Enduring Questions in Changing Contexts, which was published in 2008. She also chaired and edited with Kenneth Zeichner Studying Teacher Education, which was an AERA project published in 2005, which synthesized research on teacher education in key areas related to practice and policy.
A frequently honored scholar, Dr. Cochran-Smith is a former AERA President, a former AERA Vice President for Division K, an inaugural AERA Fellow, and an elected member of the National Academy of Education. Dr. Cochran-Smith has received two honorary doctorates from the University of Glasgow in Glasgow, Scotland, and the University of Alicante in Alicante, Spain, in recognition of her international work in teacher education research, practice and policy. She was awarded the AERA Division K (Teaching and Teacher Education) Legacy Award in 2019. Over the span of her career, she has received many other awards, including AERA’s Research to Practice Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Literacy Research Association, the Carl Grant Research Award from the National Association of Multicultural Education, and all of the major awards from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), including the David G. Imig Award for Achievement in Teacher Education, the Margaret B. Lindsey Award for Research in Teacher Education, and the Edward C. Pomeroy Award for Outstanding Contributions to Teacher Education. In 2006, Dr. Cochran-Smith served as the inaugural C.J. Koh Endowed Professor at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. In 2000, she was one of the first Scholars in Residence at the Mofet Institute for Teacher Education in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Dr. Cochran-Smith is also a frequent keynote presenter nationally and internationally. She presented the Dean’s Distinguished Lecture at the School of Education and Human Development, Texas A&M University in March, 2023, and gave the keynote address for the NAFOL international conference on the education of teacher educators in Trondheim, Norway, in 2022. Other selected presentations include the keynote address at the MOFET Conference in Tel Aviv, Israel; the New England Educational Research Association keynote in April 2019; keynotes for the Teacher Education and Educational Research in the Mediterranean Conference at the University of Malta and the Teacher Education Policy in Europe Conference in Braga, Portugal, both in May 2018; keynotes for the Global Trends and Challenges Facing Teacher Education Conference at Akershus University College in Oslo, Norway and for the National Association of Multicultural Education in Salt Lake City, Utah in November, 2017; the keynote for the Association of Teacher Education in Europe in Dubrovnik, Croatia in October, 2017; and an invited presentation for the ORD Annual Conference on Education Research in Leiden, Netherlands, in 2015.
In 2016 , Dr. Cochran-Smith and her husband, Dr. Larry Ludlow (Chair, Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics, and Analysis Department, at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, Boston College, lived in Auckland, New Zealand, where they were Adjunct Professors at the University of Auckland. During this time, they worked with the Project RITE research team and other University of Auckland faculty and students and spent time exploring the north island. They also lectured at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.
Dr. Cochran-Smith also presents regularly at colleges and universities in the U.S. and at the annual meetings of many national professional organizations related to teacher education, teacher quality and teaching.
Dr. Cochran-Smith has been an active member of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) for 40 years. She served as AERA President in 2004-2005, Vice President of AERA for Division K (Teaching and Teacher Education) in 1998-2000, Chair of the AERA Publications Committee in 2000-2003, Chair of the Task Force on Standards for Humanities and Arts-Based Education Research, 2006-2008, and a member of the Committee on Promotions and Tenure, 2012-2014. Dr. Cochran-Smith was Co-Chair (with Ken Zeichner) of AERA's National Panel on Research and Teacher Education and Co-Editor of the panel’s final report, Studying Teacher Education, which was published in 2005. Cochran-Smith is an AERA Fellow and a frequent presenter, chair and discussant for sessions in Division K, the Teacher as Researcher SIG, and a number of other divisions and SIGs each year.
Dr. Cochran-Smith was elected to the National Academy of Education in 2009, and she has been an active member since that time. From 2011-2015, she served as the inaugural Chair of the Professional Development Committee, which oversees the Academy’s two major fellowships programs, the NAEd/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowships and the NAEd/Spencer Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowships. She was also the Chair of the Fellowship Retreat Planning Committee. She served as a member of the NAEd Board of Directors from 2015-2019, and the Research Advisory Committee, 2022-2025.
Dr. Cochran-Smith was elected to the Laureate chapter of the national education honorary society, Kappa Delta Pi, in 2003 and served as the Laureate representative to the KDP Executive Council from 2010-2012. She also served on NCATE’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Clinical Preparation and Partnerships for Improved Student Learning, whose report, Transforming Teacher Education through Clinical Practice: A National Strategy to Prepare Effective Teachers, was published in 2010. She was also a member of the National Research Council’s Committee on Teacher Education, which was charged by Congress to study the state of teacher preparation in the U.S.; the group’s report, Preparing Teachers: Building Sound Evidence for Policy, was published in 2010. She was also a member of the National Academy of Education’s Committee on Teacher Preparation, whose report, Preparing Teachers for a Changing World, was also published in 2005.
Dr. Cochran-Smith and Dr. Susan Lyle are the founding co-editors of the Teachers College Press book series on Practitioner Inquiry. This book series, which is the only one of its kind in the world, includes dozens of books by practitioners and/or about practitioner research, including Inquiry as Stance: Practitioner Research for the Next Generation, which was co-authored by Cochran-Smith and Susan Lytle in 2009. The series reflects Cochran-Smith’s long-term research agenda related to theorizing and implementing in practice the notion of inquiry as a life-long stance on educational practice, including teaching, school leadership, and teacher education. Cochran-Smith and Lytle’s previous book on practitioner inquiry, Inside/Outside: Teacher Research and Knowledge has been a Teachers College Press best-seller since it was first published in 1994. Over the last 30 years, Cochran-Smith and Lytle have co-authored and co-presented their ideas about practitioner research in a wide array of scholarly and professional journals and at local, national and international conferences. Both Inside/Outside and Inquiry as Stance are widely used in the U.S. and internationally as texts for graduate courses and professional development projects and programs related to teacher research, action research, practitioner inquiry, and school leadership.
Dr. Cochran-Smith was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the College of Wooster in 1973 where she earned a B.A. with a major in sociology as well as certification as an elementary teacher, K-8. She later earned certification as a Reading Specialist and Reading Supervisor for all grade levels. Dr. Cochran-Smith began her education career as an elementary school teacher; she taught third, fifth and sixth grade reading, language arts, and social studies for six years. In 1975, she received the “Outstanding Young Educator Award,” for her school district. Dr. Cochran-Smith received her Ph.D. in Language and Education from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982. She served as a full-time lecturer, a tenure-track and then tenured Assistant and Associate Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education until 1996 when she joined the Lynch School of Education faculty at Boston College as Professor of Education. In 2005, she was named the inaugural holder of the John E. Cawthorne Chair in Teacher Education for Urban Schools.
In addition to her work nationally and internationally, Dr. Cochran-Smith was actively involved in the local work of teacher education and curriculum and instruction at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development for many years. Dr. Cochran-Smith co-chaired the committee overseeing the Council of Accreditation of Educator Preparation’s (CAEP) accreditation of the Lynch School of Education, 2016-2018. This group collected and analyzed multiple data sources related to the outcomes of teacher education, including graduates’ and program impact. In addition, Boston College was one of 11 sites of the national teacher education reform initiative, Teachers for New Era, from 2004-2009. Dr. Cochran-Smith was Chair of the Evidence Team for the TNE project, which was charged with creating and administering assessments regarding the impact and outcomes of the teacher education program and also fostering respect for evidence as part of the culture of teacher education. Members of the team presented this work at many sites locally, regionally, nationally and internationally through 2011, supported in part by an additional grant from the Ford Foundation, which investigated teacher development and teacher retention.
In addition to her work with the teacher education programs at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College, Dr. Cochran-Smith was the Director of the Ph.D. Program in Curriculum and Instruction from 1996 to 2017. In this capacity, she worked closely with students and fellow faculty on issues related to recruitment, admissions, curriculum, assessment, and mentoring. Dr. Cochran-Smith frequently co-authors and co-presents with her students at regional and national conferences.
From 2012-2016, Dr. Cochran-Smith was the Co-Director (with Dr. Lexie Grudnoff) of Project RITE (Rethinking Initial Teacher Education for Equity), a two-country research team, which features teacher education practitioners and researchers from the Lynch School of Education at Boston College and the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Education in Auckland, New Zealand. Dr. Cochran-Smith continued as an active member of the group for many years, supporting annual presentations at AERA and at regional conferences in both the U.S. and New Zealand.
Contact Information
Email:
cochrans@bc.edu
Address:
140 Commonwealth Ave.
Campion Hall- Room 111
Boston College
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467
cochrans@bc.edu
Address:
140 Commonwealth Ave.
Campion Hall- Room 111
Boston College
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467
