Sarah Fine

Sarah Fine is an assistant professor of education studies at the University of California San Diego and a former high school English teacher and instructional coach whose work focuses on transforming PK–12 schools into humanizing, intellectually vibrant spaces. She earned her Ed.D. in Culture, Communities, and Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2017, where she collaborated with Jal Mehta on a long-term ethnographic study of secondary schools pursuing deeper learning. Fine later became the founding director of the San Diego Teacher Residency, a justice-oriented M.Ed./credential program hosted at the High Tech High Graduate School of Education, and has taught graduate courses on educational leadership, qualitative research methods, and deeper learning at UC San Diego and Harvard.

Fine is the coauthor, with Jal Mehta, of In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Transform the American High School, a widely cited study of U.S. high schools that received the Grawemeyer Award in Education in 2021. She is also a coauthor of Whole Learners, Whole Systems: Transforming School Districts for Adolescent Thriving, with Santiago Rincón-Gallardo and Michael Fullan. In addition to her books, Fine has written on deeper learning, educational change, and school reform for venues