Who We Are

Mary Jean Gallagher is the former chief student achievement officer and assistant deputy minister of the Ontario Ministry of Education, where she worked from 2008 to late 2015. In that role she led Ontario’s 5,000 schools in raising literacy and numeracy results by 18% and graduation results by 18.5%. Prior to the ministry, she served as director (Superintendent) of education of Canada’s southernmost school district, the Greater Essex County District School Board, and its predecessor, since 1995. Formerly a teacher of mathematics and computer science, she has also been chair of the Council of Ontario Directors of Education, CEO of the Ontario Education Improvement Commission, a secondary school principal and a school superintendent of staffing and development. Ms. Gallagher now leads her own company, M.J. Gallagher and Associates, and is the senior lead for system improvement with Michael Fullan and Associates. She is currently named education advisor to the Department of Education for the state of Victoria, Australia and has provided presentations, advice and mentoring to school district leaders, ministries and departments of education in more than 26 countries on six continents. Dr. Gallagher has authored a number of publications on system reform in education. In recognition of her innovative leadership in education, she has received numerous professional awards, including an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Windsor in 2008, and Outstanding Educator of the Year Awards from the Ontario Phi Delta Kappan Association in 2013 and from the Ontario Principal’s Council in 2015. Most recently she was named Canada’s Outstanding Education Leader 2016 by The Learning Partnership of Canada.  She also serves on the Professional Advisory Board of the Gerald H. Read Center for International and Intercultural Education at Kent State University.

Santiago Rincón-Gallardo, EdD is an education consultant and Chief Research Officer at Michael Fullan’s team. Over the past 20 years, Santiago has built a career of educational leadership and consulting aimed at supporting the transformation of teaching and learning in schools and across entire educational systems in Latin America, North America, and Australia. Santiago led and later on served as an advisor to the Learning Community Project (also known as Redes de Tutoría) in Mexico, an effort to transform Mexican marginalized public middle-school classrooms into learning communities, which in the span of 10 years spread to 9,000 schools across the country. More recently, Santiago has served as a consultant to multiple efforts to transform or improve teaching and learning in networks of schools in Colombia, Chile, Perú, and Australia. He is collaborating with Michael Fullan and a consortium of Chilean universities in the evaluation, design, and implementation of leadership development centers that are key component of a nationwide strategy to build the leadership capacity of school and system leaders across the country. Santiago has also advised, trained, and supported school district leaders in North America, Latin America, and Australia Santiago has also partnered with Michael Fullan to design and deliver a Change Leadership course for school and system leaders in Chile. He holds an EdM in International Education Policy and an EdD on Education Policy, Leadership and Instructional Practice from Harvard University, and a BA in Mathematics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

Stephen Anderson, PhD, Professor Emeritus, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto, has devoted 40 years as a researcher, university professor, and consultant to understanding the implementation of planned educational change at the classroom, school, school district, and system levels (state, national) in Canada, the US, and internationally. He served as the Director of OISE’s International Center for Educational Change (2005-2010) and as Director of OISE’s Comparative, International and Development Education Center and Program (2012-2017). He is internationally recognized as an expert in the school district level role in leading and supporting school improvement, with a particular emphasis on system and school leadership and instructional practices. Notable accomplishments in this area include an investigation for the Learning First Alliance of five school districts in the US identified as experiencing sustained system-wide improvement (2001-2002); acting as a co-Principal Investigator in a Wallace Foundation funded investigation of leadership and improvement across nine states and 18 school districts (both urban and rural) in the US (2003-2008); multiple investigations of school district level efforts to improve teaching and learning in Ontario (Canada); and ongoing (10 years) collaboration with researchers and professional development specialists associated with one of Chile’s national education leadership centers on understanding and strengthening school district-level leadership and support for improvement in the Chilean education system.