Meet the Team

Amanda Taylor | Sr. Associate Director, Reach Every Reader

Amanda Taylor is Sr. Associate Director of Reach Every Reader where she oversees the day-to-day strategy and operations and is a member of the leadership team. Her professional experience includes more than 15 years at Harvard where she has held a wide-range of administrative roles including within faculty affairs, executive education, and degree program administration. Prior to Reach Every Reader, Amanda spent eight years with the Doctor of Education Leadership (Ed.L.D.) Program at HGSE. There, she collaborated with the program’s founding faculty to create the systems, curricular experiences, and student support services for the then new program. She subsequently facilitated the development and execution of an alumni network strategy. Amanda has a master’s degree in management from the Harvard University School of Extension, a master’s degree in music from Indiana University, and bachelor’s degrees in English and music from Boston University.

David Dockterman | Lecturer on Education

David (affectionately known as Dock), a lecturer at HGSE, brings his 35+ years of experience in developing and scaling commercial, evidence-based technology programs, to the Reach Every Reader effort. During his time at Tom Snyder Productions, a pioneering edtech company he helped found in the early 1980s, and then at Scholastic and HMH, Dock contributed to supplemental, intervention, and core programs, including MATH 180, READ 180 Universal, and Into Reading. He continues to consult with commercial and nonprofit educational organizations, while teaching courses in evidence-driven innovation and adaptive learning. He received his BA from Yale University and an Ed.D. from HGSE.

Joe Blatt | Senior Lecturer on Education

Joe Blatt is interested in the effects of media content and technology on development, learning, and civic behavior. As principal investigator for Reach Every Reader’s pre-K home and family engagement strand, Joe is overseeing the development of apps that parents and young children can use together to support the foundations of early literacy.

Joe’s expertise in children’s media has led to consulting and advising relationships with many major production companies, including Sesame Workshop, WGBH, Walden Media, PBS Kids, and Pokemon. Before serving as executive producer of Scientific American Frontiers, the PBS magazine series starring Alan Alda, Joe made documentaries for the NOVA science series. He also created the BreakThrough television series to profile contemporary African American, Latino, and Native American scientists and engineers.

Meredith Rowe | Professor

Meredith Rowe is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). She leads a research program on understanding the role of parent and family factors in children’s early language and literacy development. She is particularly interested in uncovering how variations in children’s early communicative environments contribute to language development and in applying this knowledge to the development of intervention strategies for low-income families. For the past 10 years, her work has been funded by grants from the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Her work is published widely in top journals in education and psychology, including Science, Child Development, Developmental Science, and Developmental Psychology.

Paola Uccelli | Professor

Paola Uccelli is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. With a background in linguistics, she studies socio-cultural and individual differences in language and literacy development throughout the school years. Her research focuses on how different language skills (at the lexical, grammatical, and discourse levels) interact with each other to either promote or hinder advances in language expression and comprehension in monolingual and bilingual students. Paola’s current projects focus on describing individual trajectories of school-relevant language development; on the design and validation of a research instrument to assess school-relevant language skills in elementary and middle school students; and on understanding how monolingual and multilingual speakers and writers learn to use a variety of discourse structures flexibly and effectively for diverse communicative and learning purposes. Paola studied linguistics at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and subsequently earned her doctoral degree in Human Development and Psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Being a native of Peru, she is particularly interested in Latin America where she collaborates with local researchers and often participates in research conferences and workshops.

Rosa Guzman | Doctoral Candidate and Research Assistant

Rosa Guzman’s  research interests lie at the intersection between language, literacy, and technology. The presence of technology in children’s lives continues to grow and yet we know little as to how it impacts children’s development at home and at school. She seeks to understand how technology, such as e-readers, is shaping children’s literacy and language development. This research will help parents and practitioners make better decisions regarding how, when, and where to use technological devices especially in disadvantaged communities. Rosa’s ultimate goal is to find tools that can help children be better prepared for grade school and close the various educational gaps found in the U.S. today. Prior to graduate school, Rosa worked as a lab manager and research assistant at the Harvard Lab for Developmental studies. She conducted several studies that explored the training of children’s intuitive numerical and spatial abilities, with the goal of creating fun games that could help children mathematical abilities in underserved communities. She has also worked on projects that focused on understanding the role of bilingualism in children’s executive function and social skills.