Steve Seidel - CommPartners

BIOGRAPHY
Steve Seidel, Ed.D., holds the Bauman and Bryant Chair in Arts in Education at
the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has been the Director of Project
Zero since July 2000 and the Director of the Arts in Education program at the
Harvard Graduate School of Education since July 2004. He continues his work
as a Research Associate and Principal Investigator and as Lecturer on Education
at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Steve has worked in the areas of the arts and education for over thirty-five years.
He trained and worked professionally as an actor and, later, as a stage director.
He has worked with theater companies in Baltimore, New York, and Boston and
his directorial work has been seen Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway in New
York, in Boston, and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In addition to working in
theaters, Steve has also worked on short and feature-length films as acting
coach, writer, and script consultant.
Steve began working in schools in 1971. He was an acting and language arts
teacher and coordinated the arts program at The Group School in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, an alternative high school for low-income and working class
youth. He also taught for eight years at South Boston High School as lead
teacher and coordinator of the Theater Company of Boston's federally funded
collaboration with the Boston Public Schools.
Since 1988, Steve has worked on various projects at Project Zero. These
projects have examined issues in arts education, alternative assessment, projectbased
curriculum, and school reform. He is currently Principal Investigator for the
Making Learning Visible project, and a Co-principal Investigator of The Qualities
of Quality: Excellence in Arts Education and How to Achieve It. He also convenes
a monthly discussion group on collaborative assessment for educators:
ROUNDS at Project Zero.
He has also recently been Director or Principal Investigator of the Shakespeare &
Company Research Study (Lenox, MA); the Project Zero/Massachusetts Schools
Network, a collaboration of the Massachusetts Department of Education, eleven
Massachusetts elementary and middle schools, and Project Zero; The Evidence
Project; the Arts Survive Research Study; and the Project Zero/ International
Schools Consortium Partnership. He was a staff researcher on Arts PROPEL, a
collaborative effort of the Pittsburgh Public Schools, the Educational Testing
Service and Project Zero; the APPLE Project (Assessing Projects and Portfolios
for Learning); and the Lincoln Center/Aesthetic Education Institutes Research
Project.

In addition to his research, Steve has worked as a consultant and evaluator to
numerous arts and education organizations, such as the Performing Arts
Program for Youth in Atlanta, GA, and the administrative team of the Danvers
(MA) Public Schools.
Steve is co-author of the 1997 NEA publication, Portfolio Practices: Thinking
through the Assessment of Children's Work (with Joseph Walters and others), as
well as Making Learning Visible: Children as Individual and Group Learners
(Reggio Children), and Teaching as Inquiry: Asking Hard Questions to Improve
Practice and Student Achievement (Teachers College Press).
In addition, he has authored several published articles and chapters, including
"Wondering To Be Done," in Assessing Student Learning: From Grading to
Understanding (David Allen, Ed., New York: Teachers College Press, 1998) and
"Learning from Looking," in With Portfolio in Hand: Validating the New Teacher
Professionalism (Nona Lyons, Ed., New York: Teachers College Press, 1998)
and was co-author of a study of applications of Multiple Intelligences theory to
classroom practice, "Minds at Work: Applying Multiple Intelligences in the
Classroom," with Mara Krechevsky, in Intelligence, Instruction, and Assessment
(Sternberg and Williams, Eds., Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.,
1998). He is contributing author in the chapter, "Children as Reflective
Practitioners: Bringing Metacognition to the Classroom" (with Joseph Walters and
Howard Gardner), in Creating Powerful Thinking in Teachers and Students:
Diverse Perspectives (Mangieri and Block, Eds., Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace,
1994). He is also the author of "Stand and Unfold Yourself: A Monograph on the
Shakespeare & Company Research Study," published in Champions of Change:
The Impact of the Arts on Learning (Arts Education Partnership and the
President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities).