Fisher & Frey

Douglas Fisher, Ph.D., and Nancy Frey, Ph.D., are influential educators, authors, and researchers who have spent their careers doing something most academics only talk about: staying in the classroom. Both serve as professors in the Department of Educational Leadership at San Diego State University, and both show up every day at Health Sciences High & Middle College in San Diego's City Heights neighborhood — Doug as a teacher leader, Nancy as Dean of Academic Affairs — working directly with students in one of the city's most diverse communities. For them, the research and the reality have never been separate things.

Doug is a San Diego original, born and raised in the city he has called home his entire life. His connection to SDSU runs deep — he still recalls writing his first college paper there as a freshman, an early sign of a lifelong love of literacy that would eventually shape everything he does. Outside of school he is the kind of person who is always moving: running, practicing yoga, reading, traveling. There is an energy to him that carries over into his teaching and his writing — a genuine enthusiasm for education that he has never had to manufacture.

Nancy brings that same grounded intensity to everything she touches. As Dean of Academic Affairs at Health Sciences High, she is not a distant administrator — she is in the building, working alongside teachers and students, translating the principles she and Doug write about into lived practice every day. Together they have built one of the most prolific and trusted bodies of work in professional education, co-authoring dozens of books on structured teaching, teacher clarity, the gradual release of responsibility, and instructional improvement. Their partnership works because it is not merely academic — it is tested constantly against the real students and real classrooms they both still inhabit.

Their books — including widely-used titles on structured teaching, visible learning, and building teacher capacity — translate complex research into the kind of accessible, practical strategies educators can actually use on Monday morning. Through writing, workshops, and school partnerships, Fisher and Frey have helped teachers and leaders across the country create learning environments that are equitable, effective, and engaging for every student. What sets them apart is not just their scholarship, but their refusal to step away from the work — they are as much teachers as they are authors, and that combination is exactly what makes their work ring true.