Professor Walter G. Secada is a graduate of Miami’s Curley High School. He left Southeast Florida to earn a BA in philosophy (magna cum laude) from the University of Notre Dame, an MS in mathematics and Ph.D. in education, both from Northwestern University. He is Vice Dean of the School of Education and Human Development and Vice Chair of the University’s Social and Behavioral Sciences Institutional Review Board (IRB).
Secada’s scholarly interests include issues of student diversity and equity in education, how people learn across the various STEM fields, curriculum reform, school restructuring, bilingualism and the education of non-dominant-language learners, and assessment. Over the past ten years, he has collaborated with colleagues from Florida State University on two large-scale randomized-control-trials and a follow-up to the original RCT studying the impacts of a professional development program that is known as Cognitively Guided Instruction. His research contrasts CGI and traditional classrooms in terms of mathematics-curriculum enactment and teaching practices; and also, it incorporates issues of equity within the PD. Secada continues to study how the language features of mathematics may provide challenges and affordances to late-elementary and middle-school students who are learning mathematics and who range from English learners to fully proficient in English. A fluent speaker of and literate in Spanish, he is analyzing a series of videotapes where high-school algebra is taught bilingually in terms of teacher practices and language-based math-classroom participatory structures.
Secada has provided consultative assistance to the Peruvian Ministry of Education; been interviewed on Telemundo and Univision; appeared on Oppenheimer Presenta; been a Senior Fulbright Fellow to la Universidad San Pablo in Arequipa, Peru; and been awarded an honorary professorship by Universidad La Salle also in Arequipa. Secada has presented at major conferences throughout the United States and in Chile, China, England, Germany, Greece, Norway, Peru, South Africa, Taiwan, and Thailand. He is a fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), a lifetime member of the National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE), and a longstanding member of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
