My career in education has been divided between an initial decade spent in schools and school systems and a longer period spent in teacher training schools within strongly research-oriented universities. Both research and practice are my passion, and I strive to maintain a link between the two, both in my thinking and in my professional life. My involvement in the training of educational leaders has been the bridge between these two areas, first as co-director of the Principal Leadership Institute at UCLA and then as director of the doctoral programme in leadership for educational equity at UC Berkeley. Given the incentives and expectations of working at a leading research university, maintaining this bridge has required conscious and deliberate commitment. In my view, a professional school, in its true charter, gives me, or should give me, the pleasure of thinking abstractly, theoretically, and through the artefacts of research-based knowledge. It also gives me the opportunity to be continually exposed, sometimes immersed, in the practical world of solving educational problems. This world is real. It confronts us with the hopes, joys, sufferings and needs of children and their teachers. Theory and practice, precise empirical study and participation in the lives of practitioners in a more intuitive and holistic way, have been the dual source of my inspiration.

In my recent book, Design-Based School Improvement: A Practical Guide for Education Leaders, written with the help of doctoral students Liz Zumpe and John Hall and published by Harvard Education Press, I have attempted to bridge these two worlds. Based on nearly a decade of experimenting with design development projects through the Leadership for Educational Equity programme, we wrote a book that interweaves stories from practice with theoretical forays into the professional knowledge base on design-based innovation, problem solving, and intervention research.

After several years of research on topics related to comparative and transnational education, I have devoted most of my research efforts over the past decade to understanding the power of incentives to motivate teachers and shape teaching practices in schools in the United States and elsewhere. In the mid-to-late 1990s, the United States embarked on large-scale public management reforms that drew inspiration from private sector management techniques. These reforms aimed to increase the efficiency and equity of public education systems through evaluation, goal setting, monitoring of quality indicators, teaching assessment, and rewards and sanctions. I want to understand how this system works: how extrinsic incentives appeal to employees' self-interest while reinforcing or undermining educators' commitment to public service, particularly to students from disadvantaged backgrounds. I also want to see how these models of motivation and management influence teachers' efforts as educators.

I am enthusiastic about participating in co-design partnerships with local districts that apply the findings of this research to the design of effective professional learning models. These models take into account system accountability, work motivation, and teacher learning processes to prepare faculties to master the new demands and complexities of university-appropriate content, codified in a new generation of ambitious standards common to all states (Common Core State Standards).