Andrew Knips has more than a decade of experience teaching students, leading teams, and coaching leaders in Philadelphia's public, alternative, and charter schools. He is an education leadership coach, executive coach, data consultant, and racial literacy trainer. Previously, he was a high school English teacher and school administrator. Andrew has observed thousands of teacher team and leadership team meetings, facilitated hundreds of professional learning sessions, coached hundreds of educators, and collaborated on equity audits in over a dozen schools and organizations. He has designed dozens of data tools and systems for teachers and leaders. He has presented at conferences such as AERA and NCTE and has published articles on blogs such as
Edutopia and
Education Post. Sonya Lopez is currently a school-based social worker in Philadelphia. She has worked for more than a decade in schools in a number of roles, including language arts and literature teacher, school administrator, and director of social-emotional learning at a K–12 charter school. Across settings, her approach to practice supports a contextual understanding of individual experiences through a systems lens and a holistic perspective of identity. Throughout her career, Sonya has collaborated with clinicians, therapists, creatives, educators, and families in Philadelphia to shape environments informed by understanding mental health, resilience, sociopolitical contexts, trauma, and grief.
Michael Savoy has 25 years of educational experience, including teaching mathematics at the middle school, high school, and college levels; working with community organizations on school policy, advocacy, and involvement; and working with K–12 teachers, teacher leaders, and administrators to improve the equitable education experiences and opportunities for all their students. Throughout his educational career, he has continued to focus on ways to dismantle educational inequities, improve educational environments, and involve more parent and community members in the success of all students. He is the author of several journal articles and book chapters on educational change.
Kendall LaParo is an education researcher and sociologist who studies inequality in school systems. She currently works as a quantitative researcher at Research for Action, an education research firm in Philadelphia. She also cofacilitates Philadelphia's Data &amAssessment Community of Practice, a gathering space for education leaders. Kendall began her career as an elementary school teacher in Camden, New Jersey. While teaching, she discovered a passion for education research and now uses her experience as an educator to inform her data science work. She served as director of analytics at the education nonprofit Springboard Collaborative, where she managed data collection and analysis for three national out-of-school-time literacy programs that served more than 5,000 students each year. She also worked as a researcher at the School District of Philadelphia and Temple University's Public Policy Lab.
