Karen completed her doctoral dissertation at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, where she conducted research on self-regulation in young children, music education, and digital technologies to support learning. Karen has extensive elementary classroom experience and experience as an Early Literacy Intervention teacher and as a teacher of music, drama, and dance. Karen’s passion for supporting teachers as they grow in their pedagogical knowledge and practice has been demonstrated in her research and her work with pre-service and in-service teachers. Her research focuses on the role of teachers in the educational process and the need to support meaningful teacher professional development to best support teachers in the critical work they do each day.

She recently published a book, Ready to Learn: Self-Regulation in the Kindergarten Classroom, that bridged research and practice by establishing a collaborative professional learning community to uncover contextual, instructional, and relationship influences that foster self-regulation in young children. Karen taught in the Bachelor of Education program at Queen’s University and the School of Education at Trent University. She also taught in the graduate program at Queen’s University, focusing on topics in Cognition and Learning. In her position in Education in the School of Social & Environmental Sustainability at the University of Glasgow, Karen teaches several Literacy courses and Professional Practice courses, focusing on developing professional knowledge and skills as students gain insights into the application of evidence in practice.

Co-investigator on a British Academy / Leverhulme Small Research Grant-funded project that seeks to identify best practices in spelling instruction by evaluating a novel spelling intervention program. The Spelling Out Effective Instruction project focuses on the use of spelling error analysis data to inform explicit teaching of the components of spelling, specifically phonology, orthography, and morphological awareness.

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Course Convenor for:

• Literacy Year 1
• Literacy Year 2
• PGDE Literacy
• Professional Practice Year 2