Elizabeth van Es, Ph.D.

UC Irvine
evanes@uci.edu

Dr. van Es is interested in teacher thinking and learning and the design of pre-service teacher education and professional development. Her research is primarily concerned with how to support teachers' developing their noticing practices for ambitious and responsive instructional practice. Much of her work uses video to help teachers develop a vision of ambitious instructional practice and to learn to attend to student thinking and patterns of participation during instruction. She has recently expanded her research to examine teachers' noticing for equity, focusing on how teachers' commitments to access, opportunity, participation, and power inform their noticing and instructional practice. She recently launching a new study with the support from the National Science Foundation to develop a model of professional development that brings together secondary mathematics teachers, youth, and community leaders to advance teachers' noticing for equity in teaching. In addition, building on her research on pre-service teacher education, she is collaborating with teacher educators across the University of California system, with support from the UC Office of the President to develop an infrastructure to engage in sustained inquiry on the relationship between the design of teacher preparation and beginning teacher practice. This study will take an improvement science approach to develop measures for assessing pre-service teacher effectiveness. 

With colleagues at UCI, Beth established the Center for Teacher Preparation and Professional Practice that brings together faculty and graduate students on a regular basis to share research related to teacher development and instructional practice. She is now launching a new Teacher Academy with the Center for Educational Partnerships to serve the greater Orange County teacher community.

Recent publications by Dr. van Es have appeared in Cognition & Instruction, Journal of Teacher Education, and Teaching and Teacher Education.