Key Collaborators
CEO
Judy Codding was the President of a professional learning company, TeacherCraft, focused on improving the knowledge and skills of teachers. She was Managing Director, Pearson PLC, System of Courses, a digital, comprehensive, internationally benchmarked solution to support teachers and promote high achievement for all K-12 students in mathematics and English language arts and is benchmarked to the Common Core State Standards and college readiness expectations. The courses constitute the digital equivalent of 28 textbooks.
Before Pearson acquired America’s Choice, Dr. Codding was its President and Chief Executive Officer. America’s Choice offered one of the nation’s leading comprehensive school designs and has a highly regarded instructional system. Since its inception, America’s Choice worked in close partnership with states and districts helping schools raise the academic performance of their students. She is the former Vice President for Programs and Chief Operating Officer for the National Center on Education and the Economy, a Washington DC think tank where she did research in twenty-three countries.
Before joining NCEE, Dr. Codding was an award-winning principal of Pasadena High School, a large urban comprehensive high school serving predominately low-income African American and Latino students. Previously, Dr. Codding had been a teacher and principal at Bronxville High School and Scarsdale High School in New York. Dr. Codding was a charter principal of the Coalition of Essential Schools. She was an Associate in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She served as an education consultant to the Ministry of Education in the People’s Republic of China, the U.S. Department of Defense schools and keynoted many major education conferences. She served as a commissioner on the California Commission for the Establishment of Academic Content and Performance Standards. Dr. Codding is co-author with Marc Tucker of Standards for Our Schools: How to Set Them, Measure Them, and Reach Them; with David Marsh of The New American High School; and with Marc Tucker of The Principal Challenge. She has written numerous articles.
Dr. Codding serves on several not-for-profit education boards and is a director of a public company.
Visionary Team
Sherry King, Ed.D., has been a leader of educational reform, at the intersection of theory and practice, for 50 years. She has been a teacher, principal, and superintendent of schools. She has led the implementation of national school improvement initiatives, and headed national curriculum and professional development efforts. Dr. King was an early adopter of technology, working with the Center for Children and Technology and as an early partner with Wireless Generation, which became Amplify. She later led the development of English Language Arts curriculum and oversaw field trials and professional development for the digitally published Pearson System of Courses. Her current work with TeacherCraft and School in the Square Public Charter continues her commitment to ensuring that curriculum and professional development is closely tied to what teachers and students actually need and experience.
Marge Cappo is a respected innovator in technology-based curriculum. As founder and president of Learning in Motion, she has managed the development of innovative products such as the Pearson System of Courses, a tablet-based K–11 math and K–12 English language arts curriculum that aligns with the Common Core State Standards and Twig K-6 Science curriculum.
Marge also founded Wings for Learning, an educational technology company, and founded the microcomputer division at Sunburst Communications, an educational publisher. At both companies, she managed development, marketing, operations, and finance. She started her career as a high school math teacher and the Director of Development for the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium.
Marge’s dedication to the research and development of products that utilize current advances in technology and educational theory has been well-documented by past successes. She has designed over 50 award-winning programs, one of which received a “Program of the Decade” award from Classroom Computer Learning. She was named “Educator of the Decade” in 1990 by Electronic Learning Magazine and was recognized as one of a handful of “Pioneers in Education” by National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in 1999.
Phil Daro is the award winning (the Ross Taylor/Glenn Gilbert National Leadership Award and the Walter Denham Award) mathematics educator, Phil Daro, was a lead writer of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics. He consults on mathematics education with school districts, states, and organizations. His work focuses on the design and implementation tools for improving mathematics instruction and assessment, and professional learning at every level of the educational system. He serves on various non-profit Boards and advisory bodies including the NAEP Validity Panel for the national test, the Education Development Center, the Strategic Education Research Partnership and others. He has directed large scale professional learning programs, curriculum development projects including Pearson System Of Courses and assessment programs in school mathematics. This work included directing the California Mathematics Project at the U. of California and the mathematics programs of America’s Choice, TeacherCraft and SERP.
Dr. Jenni Trujillo is a bilingual, multicultural educator with more than 25 years of experience in English Learner (EL) and Multilingual Learner education, serving as a classroom teacher, EL/Bilingual Director, professor, and author. Raised in an immigrant, Spanish-speaking home, she is deeply committed to language, access, and equity. Her publications include multiple articles and an EL literacy program for National Geographic used across 26 states and internationally in Mexico, China, Canada, and Costa Rica.
She has presented widely on effective EL education at conferences at the local, state, regional, national, and international levels. Dr. Trujillo served on the advisory board of Teaching Tolerance (Southern Poverty Law Center), focusing on culturally responsive instruction and social justice. For more than two decades, she worked with teachers and students in the Southwest and on the Navajo Nation through the Native American Teacher Education Outreach Program at Fort Lewis College, and she also taught in the college’s on-campus Teacher Education Department. Her experience extends internationally through a Service-Learning Program in Bahía de Kino, Sonora, Mexico, as well as collaboration with Ute tribes on Indigenous language revitalization.
Nationally, she served as the Director of English Language Acquisition for Pearson Education, supporting educators in 40 states and 11 countries. She later became the Director of English Language Learner Initiatives at Learning in Motion in Santa Cruz, California, contributing to a tablet-based literacy program, a large research project in math with the American Institutes for Research, and a STEM curriculum with Stanford University. Most recently, she co-authored four EL newcomer textbooks and a PK–12 curriculum with Vista Higher Learning.
Dr. Trujillo returned to Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, serving as Dean of the School of Education, where she advanced statewide and national efforts to diversify the educator workforce and strengthen rural education. Under her leadership, the undergraduate teacher preparation program earned an A+ distinction from the National Council on Teacher Quality for excellence in preparing future elementary teachers in the science of reading.
She is currently the Director of Multilingual Learner Education and Literacy at ImagiNation, a project of the Bezos Family Foundation, where she focuses on generative AI for early childhood learning with an emphasis on equity.
Larry Molinaro is Senior Advisor, NCEE, with a focus on AI in education and OECD’s High-Performing Systems of Tomorrow project. Prior to this appointment, Larry served as Director, Development & Evaluation (NCEE) and Director, Curriculum & Operations (NISL). In those roles, Larry oversaw research into leadership practices across a variety of sectors as well as the development of content and delivery models supporting NCEE’s executive development programs. These efforts included a complete redesign of the NISL program in 2016. Larry joined NCEE in 2002 as the director of the National College for the America’s Choice School Design (ACSD) program, where he oversaw professional development, delivery methods and tools, and certification processes. From 2010 to 2013, Larry helped integrate the ACSD into Pearson upon its acquisition and subsequently, as Senior Vice President, Programs for Pearson Education, he managed the development of 15 full-year mathematics courses as part of the all-digital Pearson System of Courses.
Before joining NCEE, Larry developed corporate university programs as Global Director, Learning & Development, for James Martin & Company, an international technology consulting company (now GenPact), and as a training manager at the American Red Cross. At James Martin & Company, Larry restructured the company’s global corporate learning function to support its $200M redesign from a classic consulting model to an agile change leadership model within its offices across three geographies (Asia/Pacific Rim, North America, Europe). Earlier in his career, Larry was a researcher at Thomas Jefferson University (Jefferson Institute of Molecular Medicine), Philadelphia, PA and Yale University (School of Medicine), New Haven, CT on studies related to the structure and function of proteoglycans within extracellular matrix and the central nervous system. He also served as a chemist for Wyeth Pharmaceuticals with an emphasis on the development of biochemical analytical methods.
Larry Molinaro holds an MBA in global leadership and management from INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, and a BSc in biochemistry from Temple University, Philadelphia, PA.
Research
Heather Sherwood, Research Lead. As Senior Research Associate at EDC, Ms. Sherwood leads research, evaluation, and R&D initiatives that deepen understanding of effective strategies to enhance the quality of education. Her current research focuses on the integration of computational thinking (CT) within elementary curricula. A former elementary-grade teacher, she has over 20 years of expertise in pre-K–8 instructional design, teacher
professional development, and family engagement.
Ms. Sherwood is the principal investigator of CT Readiness for All and co-principal investigator for Early Elementary CT, two National Science Foundation-funded studies that investigate the integration of CT within elementary curricula, providing high-quality CT professional development for educators, and supporting CT and computer science integration across multiple grade levels and content area. Recently, she published an article on professional development related to this work.
Sherwood also contributes to a number of research and development projects that focus distinctly on supporting PreK educators with the integration of technology into their existing math routines and promote young children’s understanding of concepts such as spatial thinking and data science. She has contributed to publications such as Education Sciences and International Journal on Integrating Technology in Education on this work. She also led the development of two teacher resources that assist PreK educators in fostering a supportive learning environment for children who are emergent bilingual (or dual language) learners, while also seeking to meaningfully integrate technology tools into their programs. She regularly shares her research with practitioners, presenting at conferences focused on PreK education such as National Association for Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and YCE (Young Child Expo) and as well as presenting at national research conferences such as American Educational Research Association.
Product Development
John Harrington is a veteran producer of broadcast and interactive documentaries, as well as a successful media technology entrepreneur. He has created award-winning content for PBS and worked with premier cultural institutions including the Smithsonian, the National Gallery of Art, and Colonial Williamsburg. His commercial credits include projects for Sony Pictures Television and ESPN.
Mr. Harrington produced and directed The Cultivated Life for PBS, a documentary that earned two Emmy® Awards and garnered a nomination for an Advanced Media Technology Emmy® for its home entertainment release.
In 2005, he founded NetBlender®, a software company that became the global leader in professional Blu-ray authoring tools. NetBlender was acquired by Sony Creative Software in 2011, solidifying Mr. Harrington’s reputation at the intersection of storytelling and technology.
Brian Ausland, Development Lead. Mr. Ausland is Chief Product Officer and Founding Partner at One Learning Community, with over 25 years of experience leading transformative educational technology initiatives. He is renowned for pioneering digital learning platforms, fostering equitable access to education, and driving large-scale technical projects in collaboration with federal agencies, state departments, and international partners.
Prior to his position with One Learning Community, Mr. Ausland was Director of Educational Research & Development, for Navigation North, where he directed research initiatives and feasibility analyses for major digital product developments, collaborated with PD teams to create high-quality online learning content for the California Department of Education and State University system, as well pioneering several statewide web-based professional development programs among other projects.
Besides receiving a Webby Award for the Best Education Website – Smithsonian Learning Lab (2019), an Honorary Doctorate in Instructional Technology Sciences – King Saud University (2008), and the CA Statewide CTE Impact Award – CAROCP (2007), Mr. Ausland is widely published and has been a part of a number of academic collaborations.
Marc Baumgartner, Product Design Lead. A designer and product strategist with more than 30 years of experience, Mr. Baumgartner leads transformational projects at the intersection of design and emerging technologies. He is Co-founder of Codename Design, a studio specializing in product design, UX and UI for complex digital information systems for education, healthcare, finance and non-profits.
He has led major projects in Learning Experience Design (LxD) for early childhood education, K-12, and professional learning & development. He has delivered products and platforms involving AI, machine learning, blockchain, and IoT for both early-stage startups through to large institutional clients.
Throughout his career as a product designer, his projects have received numerous honors including a Time Magazine Top 5 Website, a Webby Award for Best Educational Website, an IDEO Early Childhood Innovation Prize and 2 Emmy nominations for Outstanding Interactive Programming. He continues to be committed to simplifying complex information flows and moving groundbreaking ideas from vision to reality to deliver transformational experiences.