Alisha Wackerle-Hollman, Ph.D., NCSP

I am an educator. A farmer's daughter. A mother. A researcher. A scholar. A first generation student. These pieces of me make up the story that fuels my work.

I have a deep commitment and passion for early childhood education. In my earliest moments of my career, I learned many perspectives about raising and nurturing children. First as a preschool teacher, then as an associate director of a preschool, then a para-professional for young children with Autism, then as an early childhood special education teacher, then as a mother, then as a school psychologist, and then as a research professor.

As an educational psychologist, my interests intersect in ways that support early childhood development, with an interest empowering caregivers, learning about child development, and doing that in a way that improves children's outcomes. This facet intersects with a direct interest in child development and how we understand their growth through assessment, and how to help educators use assessment data to modify their instructional strategies through data-based decision making.

In all my work I strive to be grounded in community. I recognize my own identity and positionality and how being a white woman with a variety of indicators of priviledge afford me power, and I maintain a commitment to using that power to engage in community-based participatory research. This work has led me to invest my time and energy in learning to become an advocate, expert, and collaborator with multilingual communities and communitites that have been marginalized, leading to my work with Latine, Hmong and Black and African American communities.

As the executive director of IGDILab, I stand on the shoulders of many great scholars who started this work - Stan Deno & Scott McConnell - to build measures that have evolved through a frame of equitable assessment design. These measures, the Individual Growth and Development Indicators (IGDIs), Individual Growth and Development Indicators- Espanol (IGDIs-E), and Hmong IGDIs are now used in classrooms across the nation and help educators learn about their student's language and early literacy skills through technology based resources like IGDI-APEL and IGDI-APEL Espanol.