Dr Amelia Peterson

About
Amelia is a social scientist and policy expert leading the development of LIS's new MBA. Previously Head of Learning and Teaching, she shaped LIS’s curriculum and institutional design. A Harvard PhD graduate and Inequality and Social Policy Scholar, she has worked with the OECD, Brookings Institution, and Innovation Unit on global education policy. She is also part of Rethinking Assessment, contributing to curriculum reform in the UK, Australia, and Canada.
Amelia is a social scientist with a background in policy and consulting. She is leading the development of our entirely new MBA programme. Previously Head of Learning and Teaching at LIS, she has led on many of our internal processes of curriculum and institutional design.
In her previous career Amelia worked for Innovation Unit, a non-profit consulting firm focused on public services. She was part of the first cohort of Harvard University's PhD in Education, during which she was an Inequality and Social Policy scholar and studied broadly in the social sciences, philosophy and psychology across the Graduate School of Arts and Science, School of Education and the School of Government.
She has worked on a wide range of education projects both in the UK and internationally, including for the OECD and the Brookings Institution. She is part of the group Rethinking Assessment and has contributed to curriculum and assessment work in the UK, Australia, and Canada.
News
Amelia is a co-author of Design Meets the Real World: The Quest to IntroduceImprovement, Inquiry, andInnovation into the Public Schools, forthcoming from Harvard University Press.
Amelia on the Rethinking Education podcast.
Teaching
Amelia is expert in explaining complex subjects and supporting others to apply them. She has taught in a variety of settings including a large UK secondary school and Executive Education courses at Harvard. For many years she was a facilitator for the Global Education Leaders’ Partnership.
Her LIS teaching currently includes Social Science Research Methods and the MASc Capstone. She previously developed and taught the BASc modules Problems 1a and Mixed Methods and Interdisciplinarity.
Amelia was the designer and initial faculty lead of our short course Cross-Functional Leadership.
Research
Amelia currently focuses entirely on programme design and codifying our approaches to integration and synthesis.
She previously studied education systems and the ways they try to evolve and improve.
Her PhD dissertation involved the integration of comparative political economy, sociology, labour economics and psychometrics to understand qualification (credential) reforms in liberal democracies.
Selected publications include:
Yurkofsky, M. M., Peterson, A., Mehta, J. D., Horwitz-Willis, R., & Frumin, K. (2020). Research on Continuous Improvement: Exploring the Complexities of Managing Educational Change. Review of Research in Education, 44(1), 403–433. https://doi-org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/10.3102/0091732X20907363
Mehta, J., & Peterson, A. (2019). International Learning Communities: What Happens When Leaders Seek to Learn across National Boundaries? Journal of Educational Change, 20(3), 327–350. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-019-09348-0
Peterson, A. (2016). Getting ‘What Works’ working: Building blocks for the integration of experimental and improvement science. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 39(3), 299–313. https://doi.org/10.1080/1743727X.2016.1170114