Cynthia McCallister
Associate Professor of Literacy Education
About
Cynthia McCallister, Ed.D., is Associate Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at NYU Steinhardt. Her work asks what conditions human development requires and how those conditions can be designed on purpose.
Her starting point is Kurt Lewin’s principle that behavior is a function of the person and the environment. Her contribution has been to specify the environment side in countable terms: who is accountable to whom, what recurs on a schedule, and what each learner is owed. The result is the McCallister Model, formerly Learning Cultures, which she developed through three decades of action research in more than twenty schools, sixteen of them New York City Title I schools. The work led to a six-school transformation initiative with the Urban Assembly. At one of the city’s lowest-performing high schools, the graduation rate more than doubled.
Her current work turns the method on the individual. The Self-Transforming Experiment is a twelve-week protocol in which a person specifies the conditions her future self would need, audits what blocks them, and redesigns them in accountability to a team. It builds on Edmund W. Gordon’s extension of Lewin’s formula and on Michael Tomasello’s account of human agency.
Her books include A Pedagogical Design for Human Flourishing (Routledge, 2022), Unison Reading (Corwin, 2011), and, with Edmund W. Gordon, the forthcoming Reconceptualizing the Practice of Equality of Educational Opportunity(Routledge). Before NYU, she taught kindergarten through fifth grade in Maine. She holds an Ed.D. from the University of Maine.thth
Publications
McCallister, C., & Gordon, E. W. (forthcoming). Reconceptualizing the practice of equality of educational opportunity.Routledge.
McCallister, C. (2026). The self-transforming experiment: Know thy possible self. Workshop of Possibility Press.
McCallister, C. (2026). Nobody said how much: American education and the promise that became a market. Workshop of Possibility Press.
McCallister, C. (2022). A pedagogical design for human flourishing: Transforming schools with the McCallister Model.Routledge.
McCallister, C. (2021). “The rise of the phoenix”: Empowering learners to create their own learning cultures and transform their school. International Journal of Educational Reform.
Armour-Thomas, E., McCallister, C., Boykin, A. W., & Gordon, E. W. (Eds.). (2019). Assessment and human variance.Third World Press.
McCallister, C. (2011). Unison reading: Socially inclusive group instruction for equity and achievement. Corwin.
McCallister, C. (2004). Schooling the possible self. Curriculum Inquiry, 34(4), 425–461.
McCallister, C. (1998). A new vision in public, progressive education: The story of the W. Haywood Burns School. In S. Semel & A. Sadovnik (Eds.), Schools of tomorrow, schools of today (pp. 313–351). Peter Lang. (AESA Critics’ Choice Award, 2000)
