I am a Lecturer in Educational Change and Collaborative Improvement with the School of Education. My research focuses on practitioner-led school improvement. Specifically, my research involves forming close partnerships with classroom teachers and school administrators as they pursue or develop their own improvements to teaching and learning. I am primarily interested in exploring how practitioners engage with regional and national educational systems and their methods for scaling up their own school improvement initiatives beyond their own schools.

At the University of Glasgow, I am part of the Education Leadership and Policy (ELP) Research and Teaching Group (RTG). We are a diverse group of researchers. However, our expertise is in comparative and international education, educational improvement and system change, governance and public policy, educational leadership, childhood practice, and labour market and socio-economic impacts of education.

Beyond my role with the School of Education here in Glasgow, I have active affiliations with the University of Nottingham and the University of Cambridge. I am currently working on a Leverhulme Trust funded project with PI Toby Greany at the School of Education in Nottingham. The project is called Equity and Quality in Local Learning Systems (EQuaLLS). We are examining the impact of large-scale academisation and the fragmentation of local learning landscapes in England on continuing professional development and learning (CPDL) opportunities for teachers. I am also a Methods Fellow with the Cambridge Digital Humanities Lab at the University of Cambridge, where I lead workshops in web-based and open-source Social Network Analysis tools. This work includes developing and leading online training modules in RStudio and the R programming language for statistical computing and graphics.

Prior to joining the School of Education, I was a secondary school teacher in the Midwest region of the United States. I have a deep interest in improving educational opportunities for young people. When I was a classroom practitioner, I was involved in the development and rollout of a 1:1 technology initiative for a school district and was successful in obtaining several teaching grants for integrating technology into the curriculum. My research continues to explore practitioner-led technology integration and the development of 21C/future skills in schools.

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• Orr, Alastair
  Children’s Neighbourhoods Scotland: An investigation of multi-agency leadership from an educational perspective

I am currently the course leader for Research Application, a Yr 2 core course in the Education MSc: Online Distance Learning post-graduate taught course. I am also a co-developer for a new elective called Educational Change for Collaborative Improvement that will first run in the Spring of 2023 as an elective for the Education, Public Policy & Equity MSc programme.