Daniel Reinholz

San Diego State University

Daniel L. Reinholz, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education and an Inaugural Provost's Professor of Equity in Education at San Diego State University. He is a co-founder of the Access Network, a national network of programs in the US that aim to increase equity in the physical sciences. He also advises students in the Math and Science Education (MSED) joint doctoral program between SDSU and UCSD. Reinholz was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for STEM Learning at the University of Colorado Boulder, and completed his PhD at the University of California Berkeley.
Broadly speaking, Dr. Reinholz’s research focuses on creating tools for educational transformation, to improve equity and mitigate systemic oppression. His research is primarily situated within three interrelated areas.
Design. Dr. Reinholz’s work is grounded in careful attention to student thinking, meaningful disciplinary learning, and classroom interactions. For example, his early work elucidated the connections between reflection and peer critique. He designed the structured Peer-Assisted Reflection (PAR) cycle, which has been used in a wide variety of STEM classrooms to support deeper disciplinary learning. This strong focus on meaningful learning serves as the basis for his other areas of research, focused on transforming larger systemic structures.
Empower. Dr. Reinholz is a co-developer of the EQUIP tool, which is a free web-based classroom observational tool for tracking patterns of implicit bias in teaching. EQUIP is designed to empower teachers, professional developers, and researchers to understand and improve equity in classroom teaching. EQUIP provides data to help illuminate the subtle and sometimes invisible racialized and gendered patterns that play out in classroom participation, which can serve to privilege some students over others.
Transform.  Ultimately, the goal of Dr. Reinholz’s work is to change the education system so that it can be more just and better serve the needs of all students. For this reason, he studies education from a systems perspective, and develops new models that can be used for change. The Departmental Action Team (DAT) is one such model for transforming STEM education. DATs are designed with best principles from organizational change to work within and transform existing structures and aspects of academic culture.
Together, these three areas of research work in conjunction, beginning with a vision for high-quality disciplinary learning, expanding the vision to attend to who gets access to this high-quality learning, and finally understanding and changing the systems that favor some individuals over others.

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Making Change Theory Work for You part of Transforming Institutions Conference 2023:Program:Workshops
This workshop will provide an opportunity to learn about the use of change theory in STEM higher educational change. This workshop will be relevant to participants who are new to change theory and those who have ...