David Dickinson

Professor Dickinson is the Margaret Cowan Chair in the Department of Teaching and Learning and Associate Dean for Research and Strategic Initiatives of Peabody College. He has lead a project in Abu Dhabi in which instructional methods for teaching in Arabic and English are being developed and refined in a preschool and primary grade school and systematically disseminated to other schools.

He is interested in: 1) understanding the relationships between language and early literacy development; 2) identifying strategies for use by teachers in early childhood classrooms that support language and literacy development; and 3) developing methods that can be used at a large scale to enable teachers to foster learning among children from low-income backgrounds. Currently he is developing an intervention designed to help preschool teachers teach vocabulary through effective book reading combined with creative and playful activities.