Dorothy S.Strickland is the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Professor of Education at Rutgers University. A former classroom teacher, reading consultant, and learning disabilities specialist, she is a past president of both the International Reading Association and the IRA Reading Hall of Fame. She received IRA’s Outstanding Teacher Educator of Reading Award. She was the 1998 recipient of the National Council of Teachers of English Award as Outstanding Educator in the Language Arts and the 1994 NCTE Rewey Belle Inglis Award as Outstanding Woman in the Teaching of English. Recent publications include: Beginning Reading and Writing, Administration and Supervision of Reading Programs, and Supporting Struggling Readers and Writers.
Catherine E.Snow is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She received a Ph.D. in psychology from McGill University, then worked for several years in the linguistics department of the University of Amsterdam, focusing on first language development in young children and on second language acquisition. After moving to HGSE, her interests expanded to include the language learning of school aged children and literacy development in both first and second languages. She is a past president of AERA and a member of the National Academy of Education. She chaired the NRC committee that produced Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, and the RAND Reading Study Group that produced Reading for Understanding: Towards an R&D Agenda in Reading.
Peg Griffin studies language as a medium and topic of instruction, usually in collaboration with other linguists and psychologists. Her Ph.D. is from Georgetown University and she has learned from teaching at all the levels of the
education system. She worked with the Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children and continues to worry about policy and teacher preparation regarding early reading. She studies learning in preschool beyond language and literacy, revisiting earlier interest in math and science. She has renewed her research affiliation with the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition at the University of California at San Diego.
M.Susan Burns is currently a faculty member at George Mason University. She held faculty appointments at Tulane University and the University of Pittsburgh. At the National Research Council, she was study director for the Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children. Her research interests include instructional practices that facilitate early language and literacy development, assessment of young children, early childhood curriculum, and parent-child interaction. Applied interests include the development of intervention/prevention strategies for children living in poverty, those who have a home language other than English, and children with disabilities. She has a Ph.D. in applied developmental psychology from Peabody College, Vanderbilt University.
Peggy McNamara is the Director of the Reading and Literacy Program at Bank Street College of Education. She also supervises teachers in field placements and teaches a range of literacy courses that prepare teachers to work with students who have diverse learning needs. Through an OERI three-year grant, she studied First Steps, a literacy resource which had been developed in Western Australia. She examined the effectiveness of First Steps within the context of an urban New England school district and the implication of its outcomes for literacy education. An educator for the past twenty-six years, Peggy has worked in public and private schools in New York City serving as a classroom teacher and professional developer.