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  • Biographical Description

  •     Dr. Kristina A. Hesbol is an associate professor in the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Department at the University of Denver’s Morgridge College of Education, where she teaches doctoral leadership and research methodology courses. Her teaching, research, presentations, publications and service converge on the impact of culturally responsive leadership school and district leadership as praxis in guiding inclusive, improving rural systems of learners, with social and organizational contexts central to this focus. A first-gen scholar, her professional work is filtered through the intersecting issues of equity and social justice, systems thinking and leadership capacity for sustainable improvement. Dr. Hesbol earned a B.A. in Education (DePauw University), an M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction (National-Louis University), and a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis (Loyola University, Chicago).

        Her research agenda focuses on educational leadership and policy issues across two lines of inquiry. The first is focused on leading improvement to disrupt inequitable rural learning organizations, including the leader’s pivotal role in building systemic capacity to improve intractable and complex problems. The second examines networked improvement communities, particularly their capacity to accelerate improvement in rural and remote learning communities. As an investigator of a five-year Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Grant, she is examining the underrepresentation of minority gifted students in rural contexts across the state of Colorado. Her current research examines the behaviors and attitudes of "bright spot" educational leaders in rural and remote schools across the US and in multiple countries who lead schools in which traditionally marginalized students demonstrate high levels of learning outcomes. She is the Founding Director of the Center for Innovative Rural Collaboration for Leadership in Education (CIRCLE), a UCEA program center, which serves as a national clearinghouse for rural practice-research partnerships, focused specifically on improving the preparation and practice of innovative educational leaders in rural contexts, thereby improving equitable learning opportunities for rural students across the country. Through CIRCLE, thought leader practitioner colleagues partner with university researchers to resolve rural problems of practice through improved leadership, from the classroom to the Board room, with implications for practice, research, and policy. CIRCLE amplifies rural voices, disrupts the deficit rural stereotype through innovative rural leadership training, and disseminates the results of our partnerships through both practitioner and scholarly journals and annual meetings. By incorporating high quality inquiry processes into continuous system level improvement efforts, policy decisions, and accountability systems within and among rural schools, districts, and communities, CIRCLE provides a third space (Moje, Ciechanowski, Kramer, Ellis, Carrillo, & Collazo, 2004), where rural educational leadership teams and their university research partners engage to disrupt rural educational inequities, thereby developing an innovative and coordinated professional learning network for rural educational leaders.

       In 2018, she launched the Rural Innovative School Leadership Networked Improvement Community (RISL_NIC), a research-practice partnership between rural practitioners in the field and rural researchers at one of 42 IHEs in the US. With support from The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, members of this research project collaborate to studying the impact of improvement science tools to continuously improve learning at each node, as well as across the NIC. Hesbol co-edited a research textbook for Ed.D. programs, Contemporary Approaches to Dissertation Development and Research Methods (2016). Her published chapters include, “Getting Real: Surfacing and Challenging Persistent Oppressive Behaviors of School and District Leaders” in Interrogating Whiteness and Relinquishing Power: White Faculty’s Commitment to Racial Consciousness in STEM Classrooms (2016), and “Preparing Leaders to Reculture Schools as Inclusive Communities of Practice” in the Handbook of Research on Educational Leadership for Equity and Diversity (2013). Her work has been published in The Journal of School Leadership (2019), The Journal of Research in Leadership Education (2019), the International Journal of Educational Leadership Preparation (2019), Impacting Education (2020; 2017) and was critiqued in Teachers College Record (2014). As a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, she was named one of 12 Stafford Fellows for the National Institute for Leadership on Disability and Students Placed At-Risk (NILDSPAR). She was named a Coleman Foundation Entrepreneurial Faculty Fellow at Illinois State University, and a Senior Improvement Research Fellow by the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate. She has served as a mentor for ten Barbara L. Jackson Scholars, and has chaired 26 successful dissertations since coming to the University of Denver in 2013. She was appointed to serve as the University of Denver delegate to the Carnegie Project for the Education Doctorate (CPED), and is actively involved in the redesign of the EdD program at the Morgridge College of Education to integrate improvement and design research in leadership preparation. She serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of The Rural Educator and the Editorial Board of Leadership in Education as Review Editor for Frontiers in EducationIn 2022, she was appointed to serve on the Governing Board for Regional Educational Lab Central at Mathematica, a subsidiary of the Institute for Education Sciences division of the U.S. Department of Education.  One of 10 Regional Educational Labs established across the United States, REL Central at Mathematica partners with key stakeholders such as state and local education agencies, school boards, institutes of higher education, and student, family, and community organizations. RELs partner with these organizations on applied research and development, training, coaching and technical supports, and dissemination. The REL Central region covers the states of Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. 

          Dr. Hesbol has taught preK-high school students, as well as graduate students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and at Illinois State University prior to coming to the University of Denver. She served as a principal in several culturally and linguistically diverse school districts, as the Coordinator of Literacy and School Improvement in a diverse suburban school district, and as the Assistant Superintendent for Human Resources at a large "rurban" school district. She consulted throughout North America in literacy leadership, and has worked extensively with aspiring and incumbent school and district leaders in leading equitable school improvement, interrogating evidence to inform instructional decision making, and disrupting hegemonic organizational processes.

  • Curriculum Vitae

  • Contact information

  •  DU Email: Kristina.Hesbol@du.edu

    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/khesbol/

    Twitter @khesbol

This portfolio last updated: 05-Oct-2022 1:39 PM