Educational Leadership and Policy Studies
Educational Administration, Curriculum and Supervision
Office: OU-Tulsa Campus, 4W122
Email: Elizabeth.A.Zumpe-1@ou.edu
Elizabeth Zumpe is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her research focuses on understanding how to develop collective agency and problem-solving mindsets for continuous improvement in schools and districts facing adversity. Through qualitative, action, and design-based research, she explores how educators and researchers develop capabilities to collaboratively address urgent educational problems. Her work centers on research-practice partnerships (RPPs) with high-poverty school districts and leadership development programs that equip educators to tackle complex, equity-focused problems of practice.
She is co-founder of NourishED, a virtual statewide professional learning network funded by the Oklahoma Foundation for Excellence, where Oklahoma teachers collaborate to solve their problems of practice together.
Publications and Scholarship
Elizabeth's work appears in AERA Open, Journal of Educational Change, the American Journal of Education, Frontiers in Education, Leadership and Policy in Schools, and School Administrator. She is co-editor of the forthcoming volume, Teaching and Learning for Collaborative Continuous Improvement in Education: Challenges and Possibilities Across the Educational System (Myers Education Press) and has contributed chapters to Design-based School Improvement, Continuous Improvement: A Leadership Process for School Improvement, The Emerald Handbook of Evidence-informed Practice in Education, and The SAGE Handbook of School Organization.
She is currently chair of the AERA Improvement Science SIG and Secretary/Treasurer of the Leadership for School Improvement SIG. She was a keynote speaker at the annual convening at the 2023 Carnegie Project for the Education Doctorate and at the 2024 annual conference of KBBB (Kommission Bildungsorganisation, Bildungsplanung, Bildungsrecht) at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, where she served as a guest professor.
A former K-12 public school teacher for over a decade with National Board Certification, Elizabeth holds a Ph.D. in Education from the University of California, Berkeley.
