Courtney Bell

Dr. Courtney Bell is a Professor of Learning Sciences at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. She recently served as the first female Director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER), the nation’s oldest and largest university-based education research center. A former high school science teacher, Courtney earned her doctorate at Michigan State University in Curriculum, Teaching and Educational Policy and a B.A. in Chemistry at Dartmouth College. Courtney is passionate about understanding and improving teaching for historically underserved children. Her interdisciplinary collaborative work is situated at the intersections of research, policy and practice – a place where complex educational issues must be addressed with wisdom amidst constraints. She has carried out research on issues spanning parental choice, performance assessments of teaching, international comparisons of teaching, teaching quality, teacher learning, teacher education, and the measurement of teaching. The recipient of a postdoctoral fellowship in measurement from the American Educational Research Association and Educational Testing Service (ETS), she worked for over a decade as a researcher at ETS. Since leaving ETS and joining UW-Madison she has led the international development of two teacher observation systems and supported the launch of the Multilingual Learning Research Center and SimLab, a virtual and mixed-reality simulation lab. She is currently engaged in both national and international studies of teaching, teaching quality, teacher education, and teacher learning.