We recently interviewed longtime SabbaticalHomes.com member and Harvard University educator Katherine Merseth.  She has been called an “Academic Entrepreneur” for her innovative research and teaching methods over her 40+ year career in education. She was also honored as a Harvard Professor of the Year in 2017 and inducted into Phi Beta Kappa for Excellence in Teaching in 2018.  

Having grown up in a family who worked and traveled internationally, her perspective on education has always been global. During college, she spent summers with different service groups in Honduras and Nigeria. Her time in Honduras was spent building school desks for a group called “Cornell in Honduras.” In Nigeria, she worked with “Operations Crossroads Africa” building a water purification system and a health-focused model market. Post-graduation, she thoroughly enjoyed her first year of teaching in Kingston, Jamaica. She has combined her love of travel and passion for education throughout her successful career.

When we met, our conversation ranged from her professional accomplishments, philosophies on teaching and how our website has been a resource for years in finding like-minded tenants for her home. 

Related: Katherine Merseth, Ed.D.

Finding Trusted Tenants for Home Sharing

Katherine has been a member of SabbaticalHomes.com since 2006. She uses the website every year to post a third-floor space in her home, saying “how incredibly valuable the service is. Busy people don’t have time to fuss around with different [web]sites and descriptions.”

As an academic, she enjoys having other academics stay in the space and enjoys not having an empty home when she is traveling. She interacts with her tenants, but she prefers her renters to have a sense of independence, to be people “with an academic purpose for being in the area.” The space they stay in is set up to be very comfortable, with a small kitchenette area and options to use a private entrance or the shared entrance.

Some highlights of her tenants and their specialties in the last few years include: several Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) doctoral candidates, a physicist at UMass Boston, an entrepreneur teaching at Northeastern University and a visiting fellow from Germany working at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Katherine is careful to check references and create contracts with her tenants. Although after renting out the space for 18 years, she “can tell pretty quickly how compatible people will be even just from a message.” Red flags for her include if the other member has not read the listing description or if it’s a person who seems like they might require a lot of handholding throughout the process. Her goal is to connect with others who live a “life of the mind” and to help them with a temporary housing solution in a competitive housing market.

Related: Learn More About Home Sharing with SabbaticalHomes.com

Being an “Academic Entrepreneur” in Higher Education

Ironically, if someone asks Katherine about her work, her first response is not that she is a longtime Harvard academic focused on education, but that she is a teacher. She likes to say, “Children are 20% of our population and 100% of our future” and her work has always directly supported those who work directly with our future.

While she started as a high school math teacher and administrator, her enthusiasm for the art of teaching led her to earn her doctorate in Education Administration from Harvard. Shortly after, she took a job at Harvard and filled many roles over the years.

Among her responsibilities, she created multiple Harvard programs, served as the principal investigator of the Mathematics Case Development Project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), adapted the Case Study method to analyzing education, and of course, taught undergraduates.  

Her work has also influenced education policies and classroom practices internationally, with just one example being “four volumes of cases about classroom practices in South Africa, Chile, Brazil, Jordan and a forthcoming volume from Qatar.”

With so much experience and enthusiasm for education, Katherine was a pleasure to interview, and we’ve compiled highlights from our engaging conversation.

Redesigning a Teacher Education Program

At Harvard in the mid-1980’s to mid 1990’s, Katherine had the opportunity to redesign and implement a math and science teacher education program for mid-career individuals. This program was designed to give those who had worked in industry or in the military a jumpstart to their teaching practice as they made the transition to education. With her own bachelor’s and master’s degrees in pure mathematics, her years of teaching and her doctorate in education, Katherine was uniquely suited to develop this program.

At the time, there were no other similar programs in the United States. In fact, Katherine was invited to testify before the United States House of Representatives because the program was so innovative. It not only served an important need for schools but also corporations seeking to downsize. One outgrowth of this was a federal program called “Troops to Teachers,” created in 1993 that thrived for many years afterwards.

Having people immersed in the practical applications of math and science now in teaching roles was invaluable to improving math and science instruction to the next generation.

Founding the Harvard Children’s Initiative

After this, then-Harvard President Neil Rudenstine asked Katherine to take on what would become The Harvard Children’s Initiative. The goal was to tap into her educational expertise to create a cross-disciplinary framework across Harvard’s multiple schools (e.g. business, law, medicine, public health), exposing Harvard faculty and students to different ways of viewing and interacting with children in society.

A medical or dental professional sees a child as a patient, a professor of law perceives a child as a client and the business school views a child as a potential consumer.  Katherine, with her expertise in the School of Education, designed curriculum as well as research and post-doctoral fellowship programs to help the different schools understand the needs of the whole child and ways in which they will thrive.

Harvard’s commitment to this initiative created a collaboration within its graduate schools to consider children across professional disciplines. Professors from different specialties co-taught multiple subjects to highlight contrasting perspectives of children. Often that would only be taught in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This program opened the doors between schools to create lively discussions, insights and a broadening of how children are understood outside of a K-12 educational environment.

It is always challenging to create inter-disciplinary programs that work to connect the silos of higher education. After a few years, this initiative was eventually discontinued, perhaps because it was ahead of its time. Katherine’s next accomplishment, however, was perfectly timed.

Applying the Case Study Method to Education

One of Katherine’s biggest innovations through her career has been applying the Case Study Method, more common as a business analysis tool, to the field of education. Her collaborative research is especially helpful for educators to understand these complex dynamics and ultimately become better teachers.

In addition to the international case studies mentioned previously, some of her publications on this topic include Case Studies on Educational Administration, (1997) and Windows on Teaching: Cases of Secondary Mathematics Classrooms, ed., (2003).

Her work has formed the foundation for Professional Development programs worldwide.  Component parts of these programs include improving instructional and leadership practices, affecting cultural change and cultivating partnerships with families and communities.

When working with a school (no matter the geography), she starts with the idea of “honoring the practice of the practitioner” and looking at the situation as “how do we solve this problem within your context.”

Even her current involvement is diverse. She leads a professional development project with around 50 schools in the Cincinnati, Ohio area. The focus of this program (as well as ones she leads during the summer on the Harvard campus) is “School Turnaround: helping underperforming schools to improve.” 

In Cincinnati, she and her team will be working with school leaders and teachers from schools that are struggling to improve.  As Katherine states, “I have led similar programs in multiple locations including [in] Florida, Texas, New York and California, and nationally for the reservation schools of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.  I just love this work!”

She is also on the board of directors of a unique boarding school in Armenia: UWC Dilijan. It is part of the United World Colleges (UWC) non-profit organization dedicated to making education an “[inspiration for] students to discover what connects us all as humans, and to act as champions for a world of peace, collaboration and understanding.”

Creating a New Undergrad Program & Secondary at Harvard University

Another ground-breaking program that Katherine created was the Harvard Teacher Fellows Program. At that time, she was teaching undergraduates in a highly popular course called “Dilemmas of Excellence and Equity in K-12 Schools.” Every semester it was offered, over 400 Harvard college students sought enrollment in this class. The subject resonated with many undergrad students, as they had recently been K-12 students and much of the class content directly related to their own experiences.

Through teaching this course, Katherine realized that some of her students, if given the right incentive, would consider becoming teachers. So, in 2015 she created a program designed solely for Harvard seniors to enroll for a two-year training and teaching placement program.

She was able to get the program fully funded and place around 200 Harvard students into teaching positions all over the country (students who would not have thought of teaching otherwise). Her perspective was that even if they did not teach for more than a few years, their years spent teaching would make them better doctors and lawyers should they choose another profession. Her goal was also to open their minds to how influential a person’s K-12 education is in our society. Over the years, the Harvard program improved with alumni networking and the ability to place interns in the best opportunities for learning while teaching with practicum placements across the country.

While teaching all these undergraduates and creating various multi-disciplinary programs, Katherine also realized there were many students interested in education but not necessarily focused on being a teacher.

In response, she worked to create a new secondary (minor) for Harvard College undergraduates called “Education Studies,” including a collection of courses in law and public policy relating to education. It has been very a meaningful addition for students who want to add this depth to their studies. There are currently well over 100 students involved in this program.

Transitioning Beyond a Full Time Workload in Education

While Katherine has transitioned out of her full time position at Harvard University, she remains a passionate advocate for education. The international programs that she still works with are affiliated with Harvard, and her work now focuses mainly on professional education for administrators and teachers worldwide. She still loves the challenge of helping turn around struggling schools.

She also loves keeping in touch with former students, many of whom are also dedicated to education. In fact, Katherine provided revisions to this article while on a layover in Frankfurt, Germany after visiting one of them! Her former student is the co-founder of an extremely successful private school in Athens, Greece: The Costeas-Geitonas School. Because of its excellence, the school was recently invited to join a leading global group of premium schools to highlight excellent educational practices.

It is an honor to have members like Katherine as part of the SabbaticalHomes.com community. She embodies the curiosity of a lifelong learner, a trait that draws many people to work in higher education in the first place. And as for retirement, she says “I love teaching too much to totally walk away!” – a sentiment we wholeheartedly agree with.

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