When walking into Graduate School of Education professor Richard Ingersoll's office, the first thing that catches the eye is a well-displayed bulletin board covered with colorful children's drawings.
"They're my daughter's artwork -- she asked me to put them up, and I couldn't say no," says Ingersoll, a professor of Education and Sociology.
His care for children extends past his own progeny, as is evident in his life's work as a teacher and researcher on education.
Ingersoll recently received the Outstanding Writing Award for a Book from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. The award was given earlier this month at the AACTE's 56th annual meeting in Chicago.
Those who know Ingersoll said he was deserving of this award.
"I'm not surprised," says Charles Dwyer, an associate professor of Education within the GSE. "He's a good guy, very smart ... and he's on target with respect to relevant issues that affect educators and concerns dealing with education in America."
"It was interesting to get an award from this association. It was very flattering," Ingersoll says. "You have to realize that when you do research as a professor and you write a great deal that you don't ever know if anyone will ever take any interest, so it's gratifying to get the recognition."
The book being honored was Who Controls Teachers' Work?: Power and Accountability in America's Schools.
"The book is concerned with this very broad question," Ingersoll explains. "It's a question that I learned that there is a huge amount of disagreement on, and that there are two schools of thought when dealing with this question of who has the control over what these people called teachers do with our kids."
"One [thought] claims schools are too loose, and they want to tighten up the system. The other thought is that schools in America are too tight, too top down and that teachers have very little say. So who's right and who's wrong?"
"In the end, they're both wrong," he says.
His research book draws on interviews with teachers and administrators and years of research and fieldwork in four Philadelphia public schools, along with large national surveys.
"What he has done is achieve a work that is informative and important from the point of view [of] practitioners and researchers and policy-makers," says Ingersoll's former research assistant Henry May, who received his doctorate from the Graduate School of Education in 2002.
Ingersoll was drawn into education after being told for years by friends that he ought to be a teacher. "I guess it's because I explained things too much," he says.
After being a high school history teacher for close to 10 years in both Canada and the United States, Ingersoll received his Ph.D. in sociology from Penn in 1992.
Ingersoll explains that "having first taught in Canada and having moved back here, I was taken aback by how different the job of teaching was here than in Canada," he says. "I like teaching a whole lot, but when I moved back here to the States, the job was very demoralizing, so that's what drew me to my research -- a desire to discover what the job of teaching is like in other schools."
Ingersoll has been nationally recognized for his research studies, and his work has been used by government officials and cited by former President Bill Clinton in past speeches.
