Nancy L. Markowitz is the founder and executive director of the Center for Reaching & Teaching the Whole Child (CRTWC) and professor emerita in the Department of Teacher Education at San José State University. While at SJSU she taught courses including Creating an Effective Learning Environment and Social Studies Methods, as well workshops on effective coaching practices. She has also led major programmatic initiatives, including founding and directing both the Annenberg-funded university-district partnership, known as the Triple “L” Collaborative, and the award winning SJSU Multiple Subject Teacher Education Collaborative Residency Program. She was selected as a Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching Scholar, where she researched building professional learning communities among university teacher educators. Previously, she worked as an inner-city elementary school teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District and as a K–8 private school administrator. Her most recent work includes the development, implementation, and evaluation of the Teacher Educator Institute, an innovative program to scale CRTWC’s work of integrating the social, emotional, and cultural competencies in teacher preparation programs for teacher educators across the country. She is intent on drawing attention to the teacher professional development pipeline as a key lever of change. Her passion is to transform schools into places where both students and their teachers learn and thrive.

Suzanne M. Bouffard is a researcher and writer with a PhD in psychology and a passion for making research useful and accessible. Her book, The Most Important Year: Pre-Kindergarten and the Future of Our Children (Avery, 2017), has been reviewed by national media including NPR and the New York Times. Her first book for Harvard Education Press, Ready, Willing, and Able: A Developmental Approach to College Access and Success, coauthored with Mandy Savitz Romer, has been widely used by practitioners and policymakers around the country. She is currently the vice president of publications at Learning Forward and editor of The Learning Professional magazine. Prior to that, she spent ten years at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where her research and writing focused on social and emotional learning (SEL), early childhood education, and family and community engagement in learning. She helped develop an SEL program called SECURe and helped launch the Making Caring Common initiative. Previously, with the Harvard Family Research Project, she led training and professional development for educators and conducted strategy development and program evaluation for nonprofits. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Daily Beast, U.S. News and World Report, and other national outlets, as well as education publications including Harvard Education Letter, Educational Leadership, Social Policy Report, and Kappan.