Elizabeth Zumpe

Elizabeth Zumpe is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Elizabeth conducts qualitative, action, and design-based research to understand how to develop collective agency and problem-solving mindsets for continuous improvement in schools and districts facing adversity. Her interests center around understanding the social learning experiences and interactions through which educators and researchers develop new capabilities to work together to solve complex and urgent educational problems. She explores these topics through research-practice partnerships (RPPs), most recently with high-poverty school districts in California and Massachusetts, and through the development of Ed.D. programs designed to support leaders to use inquiry to address equity-focused problems of practice. Her work has been published the American Journal of Education, Journal of Educational Change, Frontiers in Education, and School Administrator. She is a contributing author to several books, including Design-based School Improvement , Continuous Improvement: A Leadership Process for School Improvement, The Emerald Handbook of Evidence-informed Practice in Education, and The SAGE Handbook of School Organization. She was a keynote speaker at the annual convening at the 2023 Carnegie Project for the Education Doctorate and at the 2024 annual conference of KBBB (Kommission Bildungsorganisation, Bildungsplanung, Bildungsrecht) at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, where she served as a guest professor. A former K-12 public school teacher for over a decade with National Board Certification, Elizabeth holds a Ph.D. in Education from the University of California, Berkeley.