Suzanne M. Wilson is a University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University, where she currently serves as Chair and Professor in the Department of Teacher Education. Her undergraduate degree is in history and American Studies from Brown University; she also has a MS in Statistics and a PhD in Educational Psychology from Stanford University.

Prior to joining the faculty at MSU, Wilson was the first director of the Teacher Assessment Project (PI, Lee Shulman), which developed prototype assessments for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Wilson is a committed teacher, having taught undergraduate, MA, and doctoral classes in educational policy, teacher learning, and research methods. She has directed 20 dissertations, and served as a committee member on another twenty-five. She currently is the advisor to over 20 doctoral students across the Department of Teacher Education and Education Policy Program. She also served as founding director of MSU’s Center for the Scholarship of Teaching, and conceptualized and launched the College of Education’s Award for Excellence and Innovation in Teaching, which is awarded every year to accomplished COE faculty and doctoral students.

While at Michigan State, she has collaborated on several large-scale research projects, including the National Center for Research on Teacher Education, the Educational Policy and Practice Study, and the National Partnership for Excellence and Accountability in Teaching. She has written on teacher knowledge, curriculum reform, educational policy, and teacher learning. She is currently co-PI on Entering the guild: The effects of teacher professional community and professional development on new teachers and their students, a project that she is doing in collaboration with the Exploratorium, a hands-on science museum in San Francisco, and concerns the documentation of what new teachers learn in an induction program focused on enhancing their knowledge of science.

Her current work concerns exploring various measures of teaching and teachers’ understanding that might be used for teacher education and education research, as well as a study of the contemporary and jurisdictional battles over who should control teacher education and licensure. She has published in American Educator, American Educational Research Journal, Educational Researcher, Elementary School Journal, Journal of Teacher Education, Phi Delta Kappan, and Teaching Education. She is author of California Dreaming: Reforming Mathematics Education (Yale, 2003), and editor of Lee Shulman’s collection of essays, Wisdom of practice: Essays on teaching, learning, and learning to teach (Jossey-Bass, 2004).