Irene Liefshitz

Irene Liefshitz has worked for over fifteen years in New York City public schools as a teacher, assistant principal, mathematics instructional coach, and professional development consultant. She has permanent certification as a school supervisor in New York State. Her corporate experience includes working as a director and assistant vice president of professional services in the assessment and supplemental instruction publishing sector.

In her current position at the national non-profit New Teacher Center, Irene designs and facilitates professional development for school leaders and instructional mentors in practicing frequent classroom observations, enhancing knowledge of effective teaching practices, and conducting high-impact coaching conversations.

A doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Irene is interested in the cultural representations and phenomenology of teaching. Her dissertation work is on teacher voice, specifically as it manifests in metaphors and stories in teachers’ conversations with each other. Irene also examines specific metaphors and discourses of education in the United States, particularly those of service, humanitarianism, and war, and has presented her work on metaphor, gender, and the work of teaching at national and international conferences. Her research methods include portraiture, discourse analysis, metaphor analysis, hermeneutics, phenomenology, qualitative interviewing, and participant observation.

While at Harvard, Irene co-edited a volume on multicultural education, served as a teaching fellow for several applied statistics courses, was a field advisor in the Teacher Education Program, and was appointed editor and co-chair of the Harvard Educational Review. She currently works as a research assistant on a book project for her advisor, Professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, and on a project with Professor Sarah Dryden-Peterson on diaspora involvement in educational development. She also continued to teach mathematics and mathematics standardized test preparation (GMAT, GRE, SAT) to adults and adolescents in Boston and New York City.

Born in Russia, Irene came to the United States with her family and was raised in the Bronx. She is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science and Bryn Mawr College and has an M.S. in education from Fordham University and an Ed.M from Harvard.