Northwest Regional Comprehensive Center
NWRCC Events
Response to Intervention: A Framework for Improving Student Learning
Speaker Biographies
Louis Danielson, Ph.D.
Louis Danielson, a national leader in the field of special education, has been involved in programs that improve results for students with disabilities for nearly three decades. He brings an unparalleled and unique depth of knowledge in both special education policy and research to his current position as Director of the Research to Practice Division in the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP).
Dr. Danielson was awarded a doctorate of philosophy in educational psychology from Pennsylvania State University in 1976. His career spans several roles in education including secondary school science and mathematics teacher, school psychologist, and teaching at the university level. For the past twenty-three years, Dr. Danielson has held leadership roles in OSEP and is currently responsible for the discretionary grants program, including research, technical assistance and dissemination, personnel preparation, technology, and parent training priorities, national evaluation activities, and other major policy-related studies in OSEP. He has served in numerous research and policy roles across the Department and has represented OSEP in major school reform activities.
A frequent contributor to professional journals, Dr. Danielson has published extensively in the literature and is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences and events focusing on special education. His particular areas of interest include policy implementation and national evaluation studies.
Dean Fixsen
Dean L. Fixsen began his career in human services in 1963 as a Psychiatric Aide in a large state hospital for children with profound developmental delays. Dean combined this work with education and received his doctorate in Experimental Psychology from the University of Kansas in 1970. Beginning in 1969 he served as Co-Director of the Achievement Place Research Project during the years of intense research on the treatment components of the Teaching-Family Model. In 1975 Dean was one of five Teaching-Family researchers who moved to Father Flanagan's Boys' Home to transition that large organization from institutional care to family-based care for boys and girls. In 1979 Dean, Karen Blase, and others began developing and evaluating a system to replicate and implement the Teaching-Family Model nationally. In 1986 Dean and his colleagues helped to establish and test adaptations and extensions of the Teaching-Family Model in homebased treatment settings and treatment foster care settings in Alberta, Canada.
In 1995 Dean began to focus on the critical dimensions associated with national implementation of evidence-based programs. This work has led to a major review of the implementation evaluation literature, reviews of successful implementation practices, and the development of a network of program purveyors, implementation sites, family and cultural experts, state and federal policy makers, and researchers.
The combination of direct service and research experiences have provided many opportunities to learn about evidence-based program development, successful strategies for program replication and implementation, organizational and systems development, managing change processes, practical program evaluation, program administration, systems transformation, and neighborhood development.
Dean has co-authored nearly 100 publications, served on numerous editorial boards, and advised local, state, and federal governments. Dean currently is a Research Professor at the Louis de la Parte Florida Mental Health Institute and, with Karen Blase, is Co-Director of the National Implementation Research Network.
David M. Guardino
As the Special Education State Grant Coordinator for the Oregon Department of Education (ODE), I oversee the RTI and PBS Initiatives, the State Improvement Grant, the State Personnel Development Grant, and other contracts aimed at scaling up the use of systems models for school improvement. Prior to this position, I was the Title IV-A Safe and Drug Free Schools Specialist for the ODE. In this role I supported districts and schools across the state with their safety plans and discipline issues. In addition to my work at the ODE, I am a doctoral student in special education at the University of Oregon. My focus areas include school-wide positive behavior supports (SW-PBS), disproportionality, and family support systems. My dissertation will examine the impact of SW-PBS implementation levels on student and staff perception of school climate, and academic and behavioral outcomes for students.
Petrea Hagen-Gilden
Petrea Hagen-Gilden has been a special education teacher and administrator since 1976. She also served as a program specialist and administrator at Oregon Department of Education. Her specializations include Learning Disabilities, Inclusion, Special Education Law, and Response to Intervention.
Nancy Latini, Ph.D.
Nancy has been with the Oregon Department of Education for five years.Prior to being appointed as the Assistant Superintendent for the Office of Student Learning and Partnerships, she served as the State contact for Personnel Development and for the Continuous Improvement Monitoring Process, a federal state self-assessment requirement. Her prior work in Oregon included Director of Student Support Services. She came to Oregon from Minnesota where she spent several years in an administrative capacity for the Minneapolis Public Schools. She has been a classroom teacher, building and district level administrator, and university instructor. Nancy holds a Master's Degree with emphasis on Learning Disabilities and Mental Retardation and a Doctorate in Education Administration from the University of Minnesota.
Erin Lolich
Erin Lolich is the Oregon Response to Intervention Project Manager for the Tigard-Tualatin School District. She oversees technical assistance to nine school districts through the Oregon Department of Education's RTI Guided Development Project. She taught elementary special education for several years and served as an elementary literacy specialist and Title I coordinator. Erin received her B.Ed. in special education from Gonzaga University and her M.S. in educational administration from Portland State University. Passionate about international education, she has volunteered in special education settings from Italy to India.
Greg Roberts
Greg Roberts, Ph.D. is Principal Investigator and Director of the Special Education Strand of the Center on Instruction http://www.texasreading.org/utcrla/tech_assist/strand.asp, Principal Investigator for Dissemination Core of the Texas Center on Learning Disabilities, Associate Director of the Vaughn Gross Center for Reading and Language Arts, and past Co-Director of the Reading First Technical Assistance Center for the Central Region. Dr. Roberts is trained as an educational psychologist, with expertise in quantitative methods, measurement, and program evaluation. He has provided external evaluation for projects in education, health care, and industry. Recent projects have included the state-level evaluations of the Hawaii Reading First Initiative, the Oregon Reading First Initiative, and the Alabama Reading First Initiative. He was the evaluator also of PiHanaNaMamo, an OSEP-funded project supporting native Hawaiian high school students in special education. He has published in tier 1 multidisciplinary journals and contributed chapters to books on reading instruction, measurement, and response to intervention. He has an undergraduate degree in special education and taught primary-aged children with emotional and learning disabilities for three years, as well as first and sixth grades.
Zollie Stevenson, Jr., Ph.D.
Dr. Zollie Stevenson, Jr., is the Deputy Director of the Student Achievement and School Accountability Program (Title I) in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education. The Title I program provides nearly $14 billion in formula and discretionary grants annually to states, school district and schools serving high poverty low achieving children and youth to provide additional resources that will assist in improving student achievement. He served as Group Leader (Manager) for Standards, Assessment and Accountability in the Student Achievement and School Accountability Program prior to being selected as Deputy.
Since 1984, Stevenson has worked in the field of assessment, research and evaluation at the federal, state and local government/educational agency levels. Highlights of his work experience include serving as an evaluation program specialist for the Division of Adolescent and School Health with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and serving as the director of the research and assessment offices for the Charlotte/Mecklenburg School District (NC), District of Columbia Public Schools, and the Baltimore City (MD) public schools. He also served for five years as a regional coordinator of Research and Testing for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. He has published several articles in refereed journals and has authored over 50 evaluation studies. Stevenson is a member of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the National Association of Test Directors, and the National Council for Measurement in Education (NCME).
Stevenson earned the Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of North Carolina at Asheville, a Master of Arts degree from North Carolina A&T State University (Greensboro), and the Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.