About

Hardin L.K. Coleman is a retired professor of counseling psychology and applied human development at Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, where he served as Dean from 2008 to 2017. His university career focused on preparing professional school counselors to apply an ecological systems perspective and on the role of universities in facilitating equal opportunity for all. His research centers on developing culturally relevant interventions for adolescents within schools, understanding adolescents' strategies for coping with cultural diversity and their impact on self-esteem and academic self-efficacy, and utilizing school improvement science to increase equitable access to high-quality learning opportunities. Dr. Coleman has also served as faculty director for the Center for Character & Social Responsibility and has been actively involved in various youth-serving boards and committees, including the Wabun Foundation, Germantown Friends School, and the Boston Public School Committee. His background includes training as a school counselor at the University of Vermont and as a counseling psychologist at Stanford University, with prior roles as a secondary school educator, school counselor, religious educator, and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Engineering
• Public relations
• Psychology
• Finance
• Geography
• Economic growth
• Public administration
• Engineering ethics
• Developmental psychology
• Pedagogy
• Mathematics
• Mathematics education
• Social psychology
• Business
• Economics

Selected publications

• Engaging Historically Marginalized Students and Families in School Improvement Processes

  2025-05-09

  book-chapterOpen access

  We use the case of a research-practice partnership (RPP) project in an urban school district to show ways that equity in RPPs can be guided by practice. Main Unified School District sponsors an instructional coach network that connects 45 school-based coaches as they strive to eliminate achievement gaps. We describe how an RPP broker connected the coaching network director with a university researcher to study knowledge sharing in the network. Then we outline how the pair negotiated the needs of practice and research by taking a mixed-methods approach that included coach-led design-based implementation research. Their close collaboration is also evidenced in the leaders of this project jointly navigating the personnel constraints and political tensions heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Importantly, our chapter highlights how the researcher’s commitment to understanding the network’s existing conceptions of equity fostered relationships, generated academic insights, and centered the wisdom of practice. The coaching network project demonstrates ways deliberate partnership routines and diverse methodological approaches can level power relations in RPPs.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Caring, character, and community: leadership in times of crisis, lessons learned

  OpenBU (Boston University) · 2022-02-16

  other1st authorCorresponding

  To prepare the next generation to become caring and effectively engaged citizens requires a multi-faceted approach. It includes a focus on personal development, professional development, program development and implementation, and systems change [1]. To deepen our understanding of how leadership integrates these values into practice, this paper presents a thematic analysis of how leaders of PK-12 schools, higher education institutions, and leaders of community-based organizations integrate an ethic of caring, a focus on their own and others’ character development, and a commitment to serving the needs of others in order to guide and inform their leadership in times of crisis. We interviewed thirteen leaders who responded to the question, “How have you integrated caring, character, and commitment into your leadership style while managing crises?” Four of the leaders work with PK-12 schools, four work in higher education, and five work in youth-serving community based organizations. Some of the leaders have explicit commitments to a focus on character education and/or have a spiritual grounding in their work. Others were more focused on social justice, equity, and system change. All were deeply committed to creating conditions in which youth can flourish. This paper will summarize their thinking about how to use an ethic of caring, a focus on one’s own and others’ character development, and a commitment to community to create high-quality learning experiences and opportunities for all youth.

  Publisher

• Special Issue on Character and Educational Leadership: Program Development and Evaluation

  Journal of Education · 2022 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Pedagogy
  PublisherDOI

• Listening and learning about civic education from the community

  OpenBU (Boston University) · 2021-04-16

  otherOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  From the United States to Myanmar, we see significant evidence that there are important and sometimes conflictive conversations about how we should be a civic community. Building on Coleman’s [1] argument that effective civic, character, or social-emotional education programs need to be embedded within a community’s values, this paper will give an example as to how community based listening tours can be used to facilitate this process. It will summarize how these listening tours gave voice to community beliefs about the why and the how of effective civic education. These listening tours found that effective civics education programs should a) elevate student voice, b) engage parents in the program development and implementation, c) engage community-based youth serving agencies in program development and implementation, d) include communities that have a prior interest or exposure to equity in K-12 civic education, e) demonstrate a commitment to centering the lived experience of students in the programming, f) have a school district-level commitment to civic education (staff, resources, stated mission, etc.), and g) have state-level commitment to civic education (education department policy, state standards and curricular frameworks, relevant civics legislation, etc) [2].One core takeaway from these listening tours are that successful educational programming is no longer a function of that great teacher, principal, or program. It is a function of the system working together to create opportunities for our children to thrive. Another is that a lived civics education program can serve to bring communities together around student learning and agency.

  Publisher

• Networked improvement community for equity

  OpenBU (Boston University) · 2021-04-16

  other1st authorCorresponding

  PK-12 education is at a fascinating moment in our work to improve the overall performance of school districts that have high percentages of children who are living in poverty, come from historically disadvantaged backgrounds, do not have English as their native language and/or are atypical learners. On the one hand, we have growing evidence of strategies that serve to improve the academic performance of all students in economically, culturally, and linguistically diverse school districts [1]. On the other, there is significant variance within and across these districts as to how effectively these strategies are implemented [2]. This suggests that we know what to do in order to improve the ability of schools to best serve all children, but we face continued challenges in effectively scaling effective strategies across a district to achieve desired equity outcomes within schools that are sustained over time. The focus of this paper is to describe a planned research-practice partnership [3] that is designed to use a networked improvement community of school leaders and regional superintendents to a) build the capacity of a district to develop and implement a policy that is designed to improve equitable access to high quality learning opportunities and b) indicate ways in the implementation of this policy can serve as a driver of closing achievement and opportunity gaps for the district’s most marginalized students, by identifying and codifying measures proximal measures that capture school-based needs and practices. The first goal of this project is to increase equitable access to high quality learning for all children, the second is to demonstrate the efficacy of network improvement science technigues to implement sustainable policies with fidelity.

  Publisher

• Educator diversity and student accomplishment

  OpenBU (Boston University) · 2020-06-18

  article1st authorCorresponding

  There are many factors that contribute to a student’s academic and personal performance within the context of their PK-12 Education. Independent of atypical developmental abilities, family wealth is a significant factor in student performance. Other factors, endogenous to what happens within school, include community resources, with a particular focus on sustained financial support for schools. Although the overall performance of a particular school is driven by the relative wealth of the students in the school, the level of language proficiency among students within the school, and the percentage of special needs students in the classroom and building, the variation of performance between schools with similar populations is driven by the effectiveness of the educators in the building (Opper, 2019). If we are going to close the various achievement gaps that plague our educational systems, a focus on how to prepare, recruit, and retain highly effective educators, particularly within our high needs and culturally diverse schools, is a national imperative.

  Publisher

• Character, civic, and social emotional learning education

  2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Psychology
  • Social psychology

  Increasingly we are hearing calls to move beyond test scores and to enhance our focus on the education of the whole child. OECD [1] has laid out a framework for what type of education we want to have by 2030 in which they centered their vision of whole child development. Research in child human development and the neuroscience of learning also suggest that we need to expand our focus from academics outcomes (e.g., math and language knowledge) to pro-social outcomes such as personal agency, persistence, and civic engagement [2]). When, however, you look at the structures of schools, there is no clarity as to who owns the policies, procedures, or curriculum associated with educating the whole child. There is confusion as to what we mean by whole child and how we measure of our success in educating the whole child. The purpose of this essay is to describe three areas of practice that effectively address the development of the whole child, a) character education, b) civic education, and c) social emotional learning and discuss the ways in which they are different and similar. It will end with a discussion on the challenges faced in implementing such programs and demonstrating their value.

  Publisher

• Beyond the Public-Private Nexus

  Journal of Transformative Leadership & Policy Studies · 2020 · 3 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Public relations

  Increasingly, school-based partnerships have been tied to education reform and the entrance of private capital into the PK-12 space, most prominently from a philanthropy sector that contributes nearly $60 billion annually to education causes. As a result, what may have been an at-will school-business partnership in the 1980s may today resemble an embedded multi-partner arrangement around professional development, teacher evaluation, or turnaround support. In this paper, a new framework is introduced to situate school-based collaborations in a contemporary context, notably acknowledging that schools today live in a new “blended capital” reality involving diverse sector influences, multiple sources of private and public funding, and therefore multiple measures of efficacy and accountability.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Developmental guidance and student acquisition of social competence.

  OpenBU (Boston University) · 2020-06-18

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In a changing world, it is increasingly important to articulate what are the social emotional competencies that students leaving secondary schools need to acquire in order to be effective learners and citizens and how schools can facilitate the acquisition of such competencies. There is an emerging consensus that CASEL [1] has identified five of those core competencies. They are a) self-awareness, b) self-management, c) social awareness, d) relationship skills and e) responsible decision-making. There is not, however, a consensus as to how schools can facilitate the acquisition of these competencies. This paper will argue that each community needs to articulate the competencies they expect from their children and ensure that their schools implement a program of developmental guidance that helps them acquire these competencies. Developmental guidance is a combination of curriculum that teaches these competencies, experiences through which students can put them into practice, a systematic approach to developing and implementing a post-secondary plan for each student, and a way to assess the success of such an approach. In the same way that competence in literacy and numeracy is developed over a child’s career in school through a series of increasingly complex coursework, we need to implement systematic developmental guidance in all schools so that we more effectively prepare our children to take their place in a world that is changing as a result of technological and social developments. There are several barriers to implementing effective developmental guidance programs. One is the lack of consensus as to the role of schools in providing such training. Another is the lack of consensus as to what are those desired competencies. A third is the lack of resources made available to support such implementation.

  Publisher

• Editorial

  Journal of Education · 2017-10-01

  editorialOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Bruce E. Wampold

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  6 shared

• Jennifer Lindwall

  University of Colorado Denver

  6 shared

• Teresa D. LaFromboise

  5 shared

• Shannon Casey-Cannon

  4 shared

• Laura Fillingame Knudtson

  3 shared

• Donald B. Pope‐Davis

  3 shared

• Carmen C. Velazquez

  3 shared

• Romana A. Norton

  3 shared