Shelby Cosner

SHELBY COSNER is the Morrill M. Hall Endowed Chair in Educational Administration at the University of Georgia, Mary Frances Early College of Education, the Adult Learning, Leadership, and Organization Development program. Cosner is an expert on the capacity-building and improvement-oriented work of school leaders, the preparation and development of educational leaders, the continuous improvement and evaluation of preparation/development programs for educational leaders. She examines these issues more generally as well as for a variety of equity-oriented aims. She leads multi-disciplinary teams that design and test (e.g., randomized control trial, cluster randomized trial) learning designs for teachers, teacher leaders, school leaders, and district leaders. She also is an expert in partnerships including university-district partnerships, research practice partnerships, and public private partnerships. She has extensive experience with and passion for cultivating these sorts of partnerships in settings throughout the US and abroad. Working independently and with various colleagues Cosner has obtained over 15M in external funding from federal organizations to state and national/international foundations (e.g., National Science Foundation/NSF, US Department of Education, The Wallace Foundation, William T. Grant Foundation, Jeff Bezos Family Foundation, McCormick Foundation, Lyle Spencer Foundation, Broad Foundation, Lloyd A. Fry Foundation, Finnegan Family Foundation, Children’s First Foundation, Chicago Public Education Fund, and the Qatar Foundation). Her work appears in a variety of peer-reviewed journals including Educational Administration Quarterly, the Journal of Educational Administration, the Journal of School Leadership, Leadership and Policy in Schools, Urban Education, Education Sciences, Educational Management Administration & Leadership, the Journal of Research on Leadership Education, and Planning and Changing. She is currently working on a book for Harvard Education Press for publication in 2025 that examines the continuous improvement of educational leader preparation programs.

Cosner is currently serving in several elected national leadership roles in the US. She is in her second term on the Executive Committee of the UCEA. She is also the Chair for the AERA Special Interest Group, Learning and Teaching in Educational Leadership (LTEL).

Cosner works with ministries of education, national and state educational organizations, regional educational offices, and local school systems in the United States and abroad (particularly the Middle East, Northern Africa, and Global South) to support educational leader development and evaluation. She has extensive experience with the design of professional development materials (including videos) and leadership coaching interventions.

Prior to her role at the University of Georgia, Cosner served as Director of the Center for Urban Education Leadership at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). In this role she expanded the center’s mission and vision, extended the center’s visibility and reach, and grew the organization’s portfolio of external funding and work. During her time at UIC, she also served as the Academic Program Director and Associate Program Coordinator for UICs Doctorate in Urban Educational Leadership–one of just seven educational leader preparation programs in the United Staes to be identified as exemplary by the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA).

Cosner has received multiple awards for her teaching and work including UIC’s Council for Excellence in Teaching and Learning Award in 2009 and UICs most prestigious career achievement in teaching award, the Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2016. In 2018, Cosner received UCEA’s Master Professor Award.

Cosner earned her Ph.D in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a former principal and district-level leader.