About

Meredith I. Honig is a Professor of Education Policy, Organizations, & Leadership at the University of Washington and serves as the Director of the District Leadership Design Lab (DL2). Her research and partnerships focus on the redesign of school district central offices to ensure that all students, especially Black, Indigenous, Latinx students, students in low-income circumstances, and other underserved populations, experience an excellent and equitable education. Her work emphasizes that systemic barriers to educational equity exist and that school district central office leaders are in strategic positions to promote equity, benefiting from new knowledge and support for their leadership. Honig has studied and supported district leadership in various reform strategies, including school-community partnerships, small autonomous schools initiatives, data-informed decision-making, and districtwide teaching and learning improvement efforts. Her research has been published in prominent journals and funded by major foundations. She co-established the District Leadership Design Lab in 2014 to help district leaders access knowledge and tools to transform their central offices into engines of educational equity. She also directed the Leadership for Learning (Ed.D.) program from 2012 to 2018, which received the Exemplary Educational Leadership Program award in 2016. Her work recognizes the importance of leadership in systemic reform and educational equity, with a focus on supporting district leaders in implementing effective strategies for school improvement.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Pedagogy
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Knowledge management
• Management
• Economics
• Public relations
• Mathematics education

Selected publications

• Central Office Transformation for Equitable Teaching & Learning: Self-Study Guide 1.0

  2024-04-01

  report1st authorCorresponding

  Self-Study Guide

  PublisherDOI

• Manual Versus Semiautomated Bioacoustic Analysis Methods of Multiple Vocalizations in Tricolored Blackbird Colonies

  Journal of Fish and Wildlife Management · 2023-04-16 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Bioacoustic monitoring can reveal aspects of animal behavior because many species vocalize in association with certain behaviors. Despite this, bioacoustics remain infrequently used to monitor animal behavior because of lack of knowledge of how vocalizations relate to behavior and the challenge of efficiently analyzing the large acoustic data sets necessary to capture relevant behaviors. Vocalizations and associated behaviors have been previously established for the colonial tricolored blackbird Agelaius tricolor, but efficient analysis of the acoustic data remains a challenge. Previous work with tricolored blackbird acoustic data relied on manually listening to recordings, which is not practical on large scales. Using software to automatically detect vocalizations of interest has potential to reduce analysis time. However, automated detection is prone to errors often caused by faint vocalizations, overlapping calls, and background noise. Thus, incorporating components of manual and automated analysis of acoustic data sets remains essential. To address these challenges, we deployed autonomous recording units at three tricolored blackbird colonies in California from 2019 to 2021 and analyzed acoustic data using a manual and a semiautomated analysis method. Specifically, we used tricolored blackbird male song, male chorus, female song, hatchling call, nestling call, and fledgling call to determine the approximate timing of breeding stages and number of breeding attempts, or pulses, for each colony. We found that using a semiautomated approach was more time efficient than manual analysis, while using comparable numbers of recordings and obtaining equivalent information from the colonies. The odds of correct detections of vocalizations using the semiautomated method were generally lower for fainter vocalizations and colonies with high background noise. Overall, the semiautomated approach had tolerable rates of recall, precision, false positives, and false negatives. Our methodology adds to a growing body of literature addressing acoustic analyses, especially for colonial species and where questions of breeding phenology are important.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Environment‐dependent metabolic investments in the mixotrophic chrysophyte <i>Ochromonas</i>

  Journal of Phycology · 2023-12-23 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access

  Mixotrophic protists combine photosynthesis and phagotrophy to obtain energy and nutrients. Because mixotrophs can act as either primary producers or consumers, they have a complex role in marine food webs and biogeochemical cycles. Many mixotrophs are also phenotypically plastic and can adjust their metabolic investments in response to resource availability. Thus, a single species's ecological role may vary with environmental conditions. Here, we quantified how light and food availability impacted the growth rates, energy acquisition rates, and metabolic investment strategies of eight strains of the mixotrophic chrysophyte, Ochromonas. All eight Ochromonas strains photoacclimated by decreasing chlorophyll content as light intensity increased. Some strains were obligate phototrophs that required light for growth, while other strains showed stronger metabolic responses to prey availability. When prey availability was high, all eight strains exhibited accelerated growth rates and decreased their investments in both photosynthesis and phagotrophy. Photosynthesis and phagotrophy generally produced additive benefits: In low-prey environments, Ochromonas growth rates increased to maximum, light-saturated rates with increasing light but increased further with the addition of abundant bacterial prey. The additive benefits observed between photosynthesis and phagotrophy in Ochromonas suggest that the two metabolic modes provide nonsubstitutable resources, which may explain why a tradeoff between phagotrophic and phototrophic investments emerged in some but not all strains.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Captive rearing of orphaned African wild dogs (<i>Lycaon pictus</i>) in Namibia: A case study

  Zoo Biology · 2021-12-06 · 2 citations

  article

  African wild dogs (AWDs; Lycaon pictus) are an endangered canid species facing drastic decline throughout their range due to habitat fragmentation and persecution by humans over livestock depredation, resulting in dens destroyed and adult members of packs and pups often being killed. Breeding of captive AWDs is challenging due to high juvenile mortality, only marginally improved from wild conditions, thus both in situ and ex situ conservation remains critical. As a result of human-wildlife conflict, between 2017 and 2018, the Namibian Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism confiscated three litters of orphaned AWD pups from rural farmers who had destroyed the dens in Eastern Namibia and placed the pups with the Cheetah Conservation Fund. Seventeen of the 18 pups were successfully reared to yearlings with 15 individuals translocated for eventual soft release into a private game reserve. This case study provides information on the successful rearing of three litters of orphaned wild dog pups on behavior, housing, husbandry, diet, growth and medical issues as limited information is available for rearing orphaned pups from the age of 2.5 weeks old.

  PublisherDOI

• Honig et al. (2017) - Sociocultural Learning Theory - Case Study Protocol

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2021-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This protocol describes a case study method employing observations, interviews, and document analysis in the investigation of how administrators within school district central offices engage with and use research in district improvement efforts. The full article with additional methods details can be found at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/0002831217712466.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Systems-Focused Equity Leadership Learning: Shifting Practice Through Practice

  Journal of Research on Leadership Education · 2020 · 32 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science

  This article shares our experience using a job-embedded active learning approach to support candidates’ growth as systems-focused equity leaders in the University of Washington’s Leadership for Learning program. We describe how socio-cultural learning theory helped us shift from field-based application projects to job-embedded learning. Our approach involved clarifying systems-focused leadership practices as primary learning targets, centering candidates’ workplaces as the main learning setting, and providing high-quality support consistent with apprenticeships and communities of practice. We conclude with opportunities, challenges, and ways forward for educational leadership programs seeking to design such approaches and develop systems-focused equity leaders.

  PublisherDOI

• Supervising Principals for Instructional Leadership: A Teaching and Learning Approach

  2020 · 15 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Mathematics education
  • Psychology
  Publisher

• District Systems to Support Equitable and High-Quality Teaching and Learning. Brief No. 10.

  2020-09-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Supporting principal supervisors: what really matters?

  Journal of Educational Administration · 2019-07-26 · 52 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Purpose Districts across the country are calling on their principal supervisors to shift from mainly focusing on operations and compliance to dedicating their time to help principals grow as instructional leaders. Learning theory elaborates that such support for principals demands that supervisors take a teaching-and-learning approach – which the authors define as consistently using particular strategies that are characteristic of high quality teachers and mentors across various apprenticeship settings – to their work with principals on their instructional leadership. Prior research on leadership supports these shifts but does not examine the conditions under which principal supervisors are able to persist and grow in taking a teaching-and-learning approach specifically. What are those conditions? The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach This paper addresses that question through a re-examination of data from two studies with socio-cultural learning theory as the conceptual framework. The authors primarily use observation data (approximately 760 hours), supplemented by 344 interviews and reviews of hundreds of documents. Findings Contrary to extant research the authors did not associate high quality outside coaching with the positive cases of principal supervision. Nor did hiring principal supervisors with requisite prior knowledge explain why some principal supervisors regressed and grew. Findings underscore the importance of supervisors of principal supervisors (SPSs) being principal supervisors’ main mentors and principal supervisors not over-relying on others for assistance but actively leading their own learning, especially through work with colleagues and protecting their time themselves. Originality/value This analysis distinguishes conditions that support principal supervisors in taking a teaching-and-learning approach to their work with principals. The authors elaborate key roles for chief academic officers and others who supervise principal supervisors typically overlooked in policy and research on district leadership. Findings reinforce the importance of mentoring to learning and also district leaders serving as main mentors for each other, rather than relying on outside coaching.

  PublisherDOI

• Learning to Lead the Learning of Leaders: The Evolution of the University of Washington’s Education Doctorate

  Journal of Research on Leadership Education · 2018-12-19 · 22 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The field of educational leadership has also come to recognize the central importance of improving the quality of leadership preparation across leaders’ careers, including at the doctoral level, for strengthening equitable teaching and learning in schools. What do doctoral programs that strive to realize such equity goals do? With what results? In this article, we address those questions with an analysis of the University of Washington’s Leadership for Learning (L4L) EdD program. We base our analysis on a review of two decades of program data and our experience participating in L4L program design and implementation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Michael A. Copland

  9 shared

• Lydia Rainey

  8 shared

• Michael S. Knapp

  5 shared

• Margaret L. Plecki

  University of Washington

  5 shared

• Bradley S. Portin

  5 shared

• Alyson Honsa

  University of Washington

  4 shared

• Wendy Schackwitz

  Point Blue Conservation Science

  4 shared

• Nitya Venkateswaran

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• Exemplary Educational Leadership Program award from the Univ…