Stuart McNaughton is Professor of Education in the Faculty of Education at The University of Auckland and Director of the Woolf Fisher Research Centre, a national and internationally recognised centre for research excellence on teaching, learning and development. His research has focused on literacy and language development including processes of education, socialisation and culture, and on the design of effective instruction and educational programmes for culturally and linguistically diverse populations. He has been a member of the New Zealand Government appointed Literacy Task Force and Chair of the New Zealand Literacy Experts Group. He has consulted with policy agencies in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Singapore, on instructional change, curriculum design and research and development collaborations with schools.

His publications include books on reading and instruction (Being Skilled: The Socialisation of Learning to Read, Methuen 1987) and emergent literacy (Patterns of Emergent Literacy: Processes of Development and Transition, Oxford University Press, 1995); and papers and presentations on many aspects of teaching, learning and development in family and school settings. His most recent book, (Meeting of Minds, Learning Media 2002), develops theory about and extensive examples of effective literacy instruction for culturally and linguistically diverse children. Current research is focused on the properties of effective teaching of literacy and language in the context of research-based interventions with clusters of schools.

Aaron Wilson is a researcher with the Woolf Fisher Research Centre in the Faculty of Education at The University of Auckland and is currently studying for a PhD. His research interests are in the area of cross-curricular literacy teaching in secondary schools and professional development. Before joining the Woolf Fisher Research Centre in 2009, Aaron was Team Leader of Secondary Literacy at Team Solutions in the Faculty of Education, where he managed professional development facilitators in English, cross-curricular literacy, and English for Speakers of Other Languages. He was one of the writers of the Best Evidence Synthesis: Teacher Professional Learning and Development which investigated key attributes of effective professional development programmes. Aaron has been a National Examiner and Panel Leader for NCEA Level 2 English. Previously, Aaron was Head of English and Assistant Principal at Aorere College (Auckland).

Rebecca Jesson is a researcher with the Woolf Fisher Research Centre and is currently completing her PhD. She is an experienced teacher with a varied background in teaching, including reading recovery. She has a Master of Education (Reading, Writing and Literacy), with the research focussed on the differing ways in which it is possible to implement critical thinking within the Reading/Writing programme in Years 4 to 8. Her current research is aimed at raising student achievement in writing, particularly focused on building teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge for writing using the theories of intertextuality and transfer as the impetus for refinements to writing instruction. Publications (co authored) include: Parr, J. M., Jesson, R., & McNaughton, S. (2009). Agency and platform: The relationships between talk and writing. In Sage Handbook of Writing Development. London: Sage; Jesson, R., McNaughton, S., Lai, M., Hsiao, S., & Leonard., A. (2009). Longitudinal patterns and the problem of transfer in surface and deep features in writing in a schooling improvement context; and Jesson, R., McNaughton, S., & Parr, J. M. (2009). Designing professional development in writing instruction that will transfer.