TEDxPSU - Ali Carr-Chellman - Bring Back the Boys: Using Video Games to Re-engage Boys in Learning

Ali Carr-Chellman is an instructional designer and award-winning author who has focused on change, innovations, diffusion, user-design and school change in her work over the past two decades. She has worked at Penn State in the College of Education for the past 16 years in the department of Learning and Performance Systems. She works primarily with doctoral level students focusing on research and producing the next generation of faculty with inspired research ideas and methods. Carr-Chellman also teaches online courses focused on helping practicing teachers learn how to improve their own instructional design practices and how to improve their classrooms.

Carr-Chellman attended Ohio State University, where she studied elementary education. She then moved on to Syracuse, where she taught kindergarten and third grade. She discovered Instructional Design, Development and Evaluation, known as IDD&E, at Syracuse and earned her master's degree in that field while working full-time at a Sylvan Learning Center as a director. Carr-Chellman decided that traditional elementary classrooms weren't for her, in part because she was highly frustrated by the lack of innovation, agility, and ready change in traditional schools.

She has an infectious enthusiasm that carried her well into her doctoral program at Indiana University. Her most recent research projects live those values out by asking prisoners and homeless people to think about how to reform schools, bringing new voices to the policy-making table. 

She has recently taken the position of Head of the Learning and Performance Systems Department in the College of Education and is excited to work with the faculty and staff in her department through transparent leadership and shared governance.

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