Dr Amelia Peterson

About
Amelia is a social scientist with a background in policy and consulting. She studies how education systems adapt to societal and economic change. Prior to LIS, Amelia taught in the Social Policy department at LSE. She received her PhD from Harvard and her BA from Oxford.
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