Lori Taliaferro-Riddick
Lori Taliaferro Riddick is an instructional leader who works within school communities to bring an antiracist lens to teaching and learning. She most recently served as the Managing Director of Schools for DREAM in New York where she led a network of schools in East Harlem and the South Bronx. Prior to her work with DREAM, Lori co-founded Raising Race Conscious Children, and led workshops with school leaders, teachers, and families on how to talk about race with young children. Her workshops focus on building practical knowledge that educators and family members can quickly implement in their classrooms and homes respectively.
Lori spent five years working as the Executive Director of Leadership Development for Cleveland Metropolitan School District where she led the Academic Superintendent Community of Practice and professional development for school leaders across the district to improve the quality of instruction and the cultural competence of the district. Prior to that work, Lori also supported principal supervisors and their approaches to principal coaching and development in the Recovery School District (RSD) of New Orleans, Bridgeport Public Schools, and Newark Public Schools. She also supported district initiatives to implement new principal evaluation modeled in the RSD, Los Angeles Unified School District. She has developed the turnaround competency for LEAD Connecticut’s turnaround principals and co-designed and facilitated their community of practice.
As a part of New Leaders, where Lori worked for seven years, she led district level human capital consulting initiatives, facilitated district initiatives to develop new approaches to principal evaluation and principal effectiveness. She coached and facilitated district leadership teams to determine and implement district-wide strategies working collaboratively to build communities of practice. Lori led a team responsible for developing principal evaluation rubrics and adapting them for specific state and district contexts. In addition to developing New Leaders’ principal evaluation rubric, she has developed the rubrics for the states of Louisiana and Illinois and leadership standards for Texas by working with groups of stakeholders to match the tool to the contexts. Additionally, she has written the rubrics for the Recovery School District in New Orleans (RSD), Los Angeles Unified School District and Newark Public Schools.
Additionally, Lori provides technical expertise and guidance to districts and states in the development of student growth components of principal evaluation and in the implementation, communication, and training of their new principal evaluation systems.
Lori also led a five year qualitative research project to identify the principal actions and school practices in schools that were realizing consistent student achievement gains –the outcome of that research was a framework, The Transformational Leadership Playbook, that is due to be published this spring. Lori coauthored Great Principals at Scale: Creating District Conditions that Enable all Principals to be Effective and developed the accompanying toolkit for districts. She also co-authored Playmakers: How Great Principals Build and Lead Great Teams of Teachers. Lori is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania where she received a B.A. in Urban Studies and a Masters of Science in Education.