Research Interests
Jessica G. Rigby
Jessica Rigby collaborates in a Research Practice Partnership to mitigate the institutional and programmatic disparities and inequalities that have shaped Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students’ experiences in school by examining and developing district and school leadership to support complex, joyful, and culturally-sustaining mathematical learning experiences. She has worked in schools as a teacher (middle and high school English and history), leader, and researcher. Jessica's work has been published in academic journals such as the American Journal of Education, Educational Administration Quarterly, Journal of Educational Administration, Educational Researcher, Teachers College Record, among others. She has also authored reports for a number of organizations including Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), Leadership Connection for Justice in Education, the San Francisco School Alliance, the Gates Foundation, and several school districts. Before joining the College of Education at the University of Washington, Jessica was a postdoctoral fellow for the Middle-school Mathematics and the Institutional Setting of Teaching (MIST) project at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University. There, she led two lines of inquiry: school leadership and informal social network analysis.
Jessica's current research focuses on leadership for antiracist, ambitious mathematics teaching and learning. Her research team, Systems Leadership for Math Improvement, works in partnership with the leadership teams of three elementary schools and a central office of a local district. They recently developed the Leadership for Antiracist, Ambitious Mathematics Teaching & Learning Framework, an effort to precisely describe leadership practices that ultimately redefine both who is good at math and what counts as math. They are currently in the process of further elaborating and describing the leadership practices, uncovering how leaders learn and develop the practices, and measuring their impact on teachers’ instruction and students’ experiences. When she's not sitting in front of her computer, you might catch her running after her preschooler and/or dog.
Jessica holds a BA in History with High Honors from Oberlin College, a Master's degree in Education Policy from Stanford University, and PhD in Policy, Organizations, Measurement, and Evaluation from the University of California, Berkeley.
Forman, S., Foster, J.L., & Rigby, J. (in press). School Leaders’ Use of Social-Emotional Learning to Disrupt Whiteness: A Critical Frame Analysis. Educational Administration Quarterly.
Rigby, J., Andrews-Larson, C., & Chen, I. (2020). Learning Opportunities about Teaching Mathematics: A longitudinal case study of school leaders’ influence. Teachers College Record, 122(7), 1-44.
Rigby, J., Forman, S., & Lewis, R. (2019). Principals’ Leadership Moves to Implement a Discipline-Specific Instructional Improvement Policy. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 20(2), 236-260.
Rigby, J., Walsh, E., Boten, S., Deno, A., Harrison, S., Merrell, R., Pritchett, S., & Seaman, S. (2019). A View from the Field: The process of improving equitable systems leadership. Journal of Educational Administration 57(5), 484-500.
Rigby, J. G., Larbi-Cherif, A., Rosenquist, B. A., Sharpe, C. J., Cobb, P., & Smith, T. (2017). Administrator Observation and Feedback: Does it lead towards improvement in inquiry-oriented math instruction? Educational Administration Quarterly, 53(3), 475-516.
Rigby, J. G. (2016). Principals’ Conceptions of Instructional Leadership and their Informal Social Networks: An exploration of the mechanisms of the meso level. American Journal of Education. 122(3), 433-464.
Rigby, J. G. & Tredway, L. (2015). Actions Matter: How School Leaders Enact Equity Principles. In M. Khalifa, C. Grant & N. W. Arnold (Eds.), The Handbook of Urban Educational Leadership Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Link for the Equity Framework.
Rigby, J. (2015). Principals' Sensemaking and Enactment of Teacher Evaluation. Journal of Educational Administration, 53(3), 374-392.
Rigby, J. G. (2014). Three Logics of Instructional Leadership. Educational Administration Quarterly, 50(4), 610-644.