Andrew Wayne
Andrew Wayne is a managing researcher at AIR. He develops, supervises, and leads work designed to improve K-12 education.
Dr. Wayne’s main line of work focuses on K-12 teacher professional learning. Over the last two decades, he conducted groundbreaking studies of professional learning programs and their impact on teacher and student outcomes. Through these studies, he helped schools try out new practices and generated rigorous evidence that garnered national attention. The evidence advanced the field’s understanding of key strategies, such as instructional coaching, content-focused professional learning, and performance feedback for teachers.
Today Dr. Wayne leads partnerships to develop, improve, scale, and test the impact of innovative K-12 teacher professional learning programs. He and others at AIR advocate for rigorous studies of teacher professional learning programs that are field-responsive and scalable.
Drawing on the lessons from work conducted at AIR and elsewhere, Dr. Wayne regularly contributes in national forums for those trying to improve professional learning—such as those convened by Learning Forward and the Research Partnership for Professional Learning. He serves on the Advisory Board of the Center on Great Teachers and Leaders.
A related line of Dr. Wayne’s work examines federal policy and its implementation. For the U.S. Department of Education, he led an evaluation of the implementation of federal policies designed to ensure an equitable distribution of effective teachers, and to encourage the use of better measures of teacher effectiveness. He also contributed to major evaluations by AIR of state and local implementation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
In his broader corporate role, Dr. Wayne works to ensure that projects provide high-quality, timely, efficient services that meet client needs and add to the evidence base. He currently provides management oversight for several projects and senior staff focused on rigorous research and evaluation. He also contributes to business development, providing strategic direction and expanding AIR’s role in bridging research and practice.
Before coming to AIR in 2004, he was a middle and high school computer science teacher, and a researcher at SRI International.
Ph.D., University of Maryland, School of Public Affairs; M.A., University of Texas at Austin, College of Education; B.S., Physics, Dickinson College
