Almut Zieher, PhD

Almut Zieher, Ph.D. has worked as an Associate Research Scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence since July 2021. Effective July 1, 2023, Almut will transition to the Education Collaboratory at Yale within the Yale Child Study Center. She started researching at Yale in 2019 as a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Consultation Center at Yale. Dr. Zieher received her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology, their M.A. in Special Education, and her B.A. in Elementary Education from the University of New Mexico.

Dr. Zieher’s experiences as a general and special education teacher lead them to study how teachers learn and engage in social and emotional behaviors to increase their well-being and pedagogical effectiveness. She uses social, emotional, and mindfulness theories and approaches to inform training and measure development. Previously they deployed a mindfulness training using the skills from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy with pre-service teachers. Currently, their work focuses on teacher measures, including developing the Social and Emotional Learning Observational Checklist (SELOC, IES R305A210262) measuring elementary school teacher’s social and emotional teaching, a teacher self-report measure of emotion-focused SEL implementation, and the Objective Awareness and Mindfulness Measure (OAMM) an objective teacher self-report measure funded by a Mind and Life PEACE grant. She is creating these measures to better understand and improve social and emotional (including mindfulness) school programming by better understanding how and which program components are beneficial to whom.