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Amanda Godley

  • Interim Vice Provost for Undergraduate Studies
  • Vice Provost for Graduate Studies

Amanda Godley joined the School of Education at the University of Pittsburgh in 2002. In addition to being Vice Provost for Graduate Studies, she is a Professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Leading in the School of Education and holds secondary appointments in the Department of Linguistics and the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program. She is also a faculty fellow in the Center for Urban Education and the Honors College, and a center associate at the Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC).

Godley’s research is focused on improving instructional quality and equity at the college and high school levels and relates to educational excellence, diversity and innovation. She pursues three strands of research: high-quality classroom discussions, dialect diversity and inclusion in the classroom, and peer review and revision of writing, particularly in urban schools. Her most recent line of research draws from advances in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to develop computer-based methods and apps for supporting writing development and high-quality classroom talk in high school and college settings. Godley’s research has been funded by the American Educational Research Association, the Institute of Education Sciences, the National Science Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation.

Dr. Godley is the author of the book Critical Language Pedagogy: Interrogating Language, Dialects and Power in Teacher Education (2018, Peter Lang). Her research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Educational Researcher, Reading Research Quarterly, Research in the Teaching of English, Linguistics and Education, and Urban Education. In addition to her scholarship, Godley has led numerous educational workshops for school districts, national professional development organizations, and universities. 

    Education & Training

  • PhD in Language, Literacy and Culture, University of California at Berkeley
  • MA in Language, Literacy and Culture, University of California at Berkeley
  • BA in Classics and Fundamentals: Issues and Texts, University of Chicago
Awards
School of Education Dean's Distinguished Mentoring Award, 2021
Senior Vice Chancellor for Engagement Partnerships of Distinction Award, 2020
Spencer Foundation Mid-Career Grant Awardee, 2016-2017
Citizen Activist Award, Keystone Research Center/Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, 2012
National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2005-2007
Representative Publications

Olshefski, C., Lugini, L., Singh, R., Litman, D. & Godley, A. (2020). The Discussion Tracker Corpus of Collaborative Argumentation. For Conference Proceedings of the 2020 Language Resources and Evaluation Conference.  

Jensen, E., Donnelly, P.J., Dale, M., Kelly, S., Godley, A., D’Mello, S. (2019). Toward Automated Feedback on Teacher Discourse to Enhance Teaching Effectiveness. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Honolulu, Hawaii.

Stone, C., Donnelly, P.J., Dale, M., Capello, S., Kelly, S., Godley, A., D’Mello, S. (2019).  Utterance-level modeling of indicators of engaging classroom discourse. In Proceedings of the 2019 Educational Data Mining Conference. Montreal, Canada.  

Godley, A. J. & Reaser, J. (2018). Critical language pedagogy: Interrogating language, dialects and power in teacher education. “Social Justice Across Contexts in  Education” Series. Peter Lang Publishing. 

Loretto, A., DeMartino, S. & Godley, A. J. (2016). Secondary students’ perceptions of peer review of writing. Research in the Teaching of English, 51(2), 134-161. 

Research Interests

Equity and diversity in education

Literacy learning, writing and peer review

Urban education

Sociolinguistics

Educational applications of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing