Senior Research Associate Julie Duffield manages webinars for SchoolsMovingUp, WestEd's award-winning school improvement website.
SchoolsMovingUp helps schools and districts address the immense challenge of raising student achievement in low-performing schools. This site offers a wealth of practical ideas and models for school improvement including webinars featuring experts who share lessons learned, new ideas, and related resources about various education topics. Duffield has managed webinars on topics such as English learners and the language arts, high school dropout rates, charter schools, early childhood, and Response to Intervention.
A member of WestEd's Comprehensive School Assistance Program, Duffield also works on school improvement projects and has served on school improvement teams.
Duffield joined WestEd in 1990. She has more than 25 years of experience both within and outside of the classroom, including working with diverse learners. Beginning in the early 1980s, Duffield provided technical assistance to educators on language arts for English language learners in remote rural communities, using technology to support professional development.
Duffield has been an early adopter of using communications technologies, such as web-based conferencing, to support dissemination engagement and communities of practice. She has worked on state and federal initiatives to apply technology to support student learning. As a member of WestEd's Distance Learning Resource Network, Duffield was an early adopter of online learning including using technology in teacher professional development.
She also managed the Access and Equity strand of WestEd's Regional Technology in Education Consortium where she highlighted best practices of differentiated instruction and technology to support diverse learners in reading and writing skills. As part of this work, she developed the Using Technology to Support Diverse Learners website. More recently she has blogged about diverse learners access issues as part of The Infinite Thinking Machine, designed to help teachers and students thrive in the 21st century.
In 2005, Duffield and her SchoolsMovingUp colleagues received the Annual Award for Exceptional Contribution to the WestEd Community for their innovative website and outreach methods to increase the agency's reach to schools and districts.
Duffield received a BA in psychology from the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, a teaching diploma from Kedron College, Brisbane, Australia, and a technology in education certificate from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
