Thomas Smith Email & Phone Number

Tom Smith is dean of the School of Education at the University of California, Davis. He is a highly accomplished researcher, educator, and leader with more than 30 years of experience in education, and has held several leadership roles at UC Riverside, including interim provost and executive vice chancellor, dean of the Graduate School of Education, and interim vice chancellor for Student Affairs. Prior to joining UC Davis in 2024, he was a professor of public policy and education in Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College.His research focuses on increasing the coherence and quality of supports for teachers’ instructional improvement and retention (e.g., collaborative planning time, professional development, coaching, and administrator observation and feedback) in collaboration with districts through research-practice partnerships. He is also Co-PI of the California Teacher Education Research and Improvement Network, working with the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing and the California Department of Education to develop a state-wide data system to follow individuals who earn a teaching credential from their teacher education program through their experiences in the teaching workforce. Smith served as the Executive Director (2014-2017) and Director (2010-2014) of the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools (NCSU), a national research and development center funded by the Institute for Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education. NCSU is a collaboration between 5 universities, two large urban districts, and a developer of educational tools and programs (EDC) formed to enhance the capacity of school districts to identify effective practices, design and test innovations that capture the core components of those practices, and then implement the innovations in ways that improve the learning opportunities for students from traditionally low performing groups. In addition, since 2006, Dr. Smith has also co-directed, with Professor Paul Cobb at Vanderbilt, the MIST project—an NSF-funded collaboration with four large urban districts to investigate, test, and refine a set of conjectures regarding the organizational arrangements, social relations, and material resources needed to enhance the impact of professional development on mathematics teachers' instructional practices. He is co-author of Systems for Instructional Improvement: Creating Coherence from the Classroom to the District Office (2018, Harvard Education Press).

Listed skills include Research, Grant Writing, Qualitative Research, Teaching, and 10 others.